Winston Wu

College Hall A, Room 4B wswu at hawaii dot edu

Aloha! I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. My primary research interests are in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics, though I have broad interests that span Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science. I aim to build technologies that benefit the local community.

Some areas I have recently been working on:

• AI for Language Revitalization: low-resource and multilingual machine translation, speech recognition and synthesis, educational tools for ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian)
• Computational Linguistics: computational etymology, lexicography, corpus linguistics
• Computational Astronomy: applied machine learning, neural network models for large-scale multimodal datasets
• Computational Social Science: understanding societal biases and cultural values in multilingual data and large language models

I'm recruiting students for Spring 2025! If you are a current UH student interested in any of the above topics, please send me an email.

I also organize NACLO on the Big Island. If you are a high school student interested in competing, please see our site page.

Before coming to UH Hilo, I was a postdoc at the University of Michigan working with Rada Mihalcea and Lu Wang at the intersection of NLP and computational social science. I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University, where I was affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing and worked with David Yarowsky on NLP across thousands of languages. Before that, I earned my undergraduate degrees in computer science (as a Turing Scholar) and in Latin (salvē!) from UT Austin, where I worked with Katrin Erk on computational semantics.