About

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, specifically for multilingual and low-resource applications. My broader interests span Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science. My overarching research goal is to build technologies that educate and improve our lives.

Some areas I have recently been working on:

• AI for Language Revitalization: low-resource machine translation, speech recognition and synthesis, educational tools for the Hawaiian language
• Computational Social Science: understanding societal biases and cultural values in multilingual data and large language models
• Computational Astronomy: applying machine learning to large datasets from space missions such as TESS and GAIA

I'm recruiting students for Spring 2024! If you are a current UH Hilo student interested in NLP or data science research, please send me an email.

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.