University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | School

Ming-Yu Liu is a vice president of research at NVIDIA and an IEEE Fellow. He leads the Deep Imagination Research group, which focuses on deep generative models for content creation and foundation models for physical AI. He previously held research leadership roles at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America and National Tsing Hua University, and he earned degrees from National Taiwan University, National Chiao Tung University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Chao Zhang is an applied scientist in the Alibaba Foundation Model team. His public profile notes a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and research interests in NLP, large language models, reasoning, and multimodal generation.

Hannaneh Hajishirzi is Senior Director at Ai2 and a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Her public materials focus on generative AI, reasoning, open language models, pre-training, and evaluation.

Zilong Huang is a principal researcher at Tencent Singapore whose work focuses on multimodal interaction, multimodal agents, multimodal pretraining, and efficient model architectures. He previously worked at ByteDance and received his Ph.D. and B.E. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Boxin Wang is a senior research scientist at NVIDIA working on practical and scalable large language models, including trustworthiness, multimodal language modeling, and retrieval-augmented generation. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Jieyu Zhang's personal site says she is a final-year PhD student in computer science at the University of Washington advised by Ranjay Krishna and Alex Ratner. UW RAIVN also lists her as a PhD student since 2020, and her site lists an AI2 research internship beginning in January 2025.

Shashank Gupta's public homepage describes him as an applied scientist at Ai2 focused on agentic LLMs, test-time compute, post-training, and reasoning, after earlier work in Microsoft AI.

Zhuolin Yang's personal page says he is a Research Scientist at NVIDIA ADLR whose interests include trustworthy machine learning, multimodal LLMs, and reasoning.

Amelie Haghighat is an incoming assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago whose research focuses on trustworthy and resource-efficient machine learning systems.

Works on information extraction, tabular data, and NLP for healthcare, and previously completed an MS in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Yangyi Chen is a research scientist at NVIDIA. His homepage says he works on LLM post-training and LLM-based coding agents, and it lists him as a Nemotron-Cascade 2 coauthor.

Aston Zhang is a member of technical staff at OpenAI, author of Dive into Deep Learning, and a core contributor to Llama 3. His homepage says he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Ming-Yu Liu

Chao Zhang

Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Zilong Huang

Boxin Wang

Jieyu Zhang

Shashank Gupta

Zhuolin Yang

Amelie Haghighat

Chufan Gao

Yangyi Chen

Aston Zhang