Five graduate students win SEAS Award for Excellence

Five Princeton computer science doctoral students have won an Award for Excellence from the School of Engineering and Applied Science: Diana Cai, Xinyi Chen, Minsung Kim, Shunyu Yao, and Zexuan Zhong. 

The award recognizes advanced graduate students who have performed at the highest levels as scholars, researchers and teachers. Students are nominated by departmental faculty. Winners receive a $2,000 supplement to their regular stipend.

Diana Cai is advised by by Ryan P. Adams and Barbara Engelhardt. Her researcher is broadly focused on developing robust and reliable methods for data analysis and understanding their properties. She is a member of the Laboratory for Intelligent Probabilistic Systems Group and the Biological and Evolutionary Explorations using Hierarchical Integrative Statistical Models Group. Her research has been supported by a Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning.

Xinyi Chen is advised by Elad Hazan and is a member of the Minimizing Regret Group. She is also a research scientist at Google AI Princeton. Her research is at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and dynamical systems. Chen's research has been funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Gordon Wu Fellowship from Princeton University.

Minsung Kim is advised by Kyle Jamieson at the Princeton Advanced Wireless Systems Research Group. His research interest includes wireless networks and quantum computing. Kim is the recipient of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship and his research has been supported by NASA, Universities Space Research Association, and Princeton University. 

Shunyu Yao is advised by Karthik Narasimhan and is a member of the Princeton Natural Language Processing Group. His research interests include language, reinforcement, representation learning and their interplays, e.g. enabling language models to act in interactive games or game agents to evolve communications resembling language.

Zexuan Zhong is advised by Danqi Chen and is a member of the Princeton Natural Language Processing Group. His research focuses on natural language processing and machine learning, with a long term goal of bulding efficient and robust systems that can understand human language. Zhong is supported by a J.P. Morgan PhD Fellowship.