William Wang

William Wang is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), holding the Mellichamp Chair in Artificial Intelligence. He leads the UCSB NLP Group, directs the Center for Responsible Machine Learning, and co-directs the Mind and Machine Intelligence Initiative. His research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and interdisciplinary data science, emphasizing scalable algorithms for complex datasets. He earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and has mentored numerous students in AI and NLP.

• Affiliations: Director of UCSB NLP Group, UCSB Center for Responsible Machine Learning, and Mind and Machine Intelligence Initiative.
• Education: PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, MS from Columbia University.

Research interests include statistical relational learning, knowledge representation, and ethical AI. Notable awards include the NSF CAREER Award, IEEE AI's 10 to Watch, and the Karen Sparck Jones Award. His work bridges theoretical foundations and practical applications in AI, with contributions to vision-language models, multimodal reasoning, and generative AI.

Key publications span top venues like NeurIPS, ICLR, and CVPR, addressing challenges in LLM reasoning, video generation, and ethical AI systems. He has advised over 15 PhD students and postdocs, many now in academia and industry leadership roles.

Labs/Teams: UCSB NLP Group, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, and collaborations on multimodal AI and safety.