Two graduate students in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science received 2023 Google Ph.D. fellowships. The Machine Learning Department's Yiding Jiang received a machine learning fellowship, while the Language Technologies Institute's Zhiqing Sun received a natural language processing fellowship.

Google Ph.D. fellowships are awarded to exemplary doctoral students in computer science and related fields. The fellowships acknowledge the students' contributions to their specialty areas and provide funding for their education and research. Fellows receive support as they pursue their Ph.D. and are connected to a Google research mentor.

Jiang's research focuses on understanding how high-capacity machine learning systems built on deep neural networks learn and generalize. He then uses these insights to improve those systems. His research spans topics including representation learning, reinforcement learning, nonconvex optimization and generalization, including concrete generalization bounds and less understood empirical phenomena such as out-of-distribution and zero-shot generalization.

Sun studies machine learning and natural language reasoning. His recent research focuses on aligning foundation models in a scalable manner and enhancing the reliability of models such as large language models and large multimodal models through minimal human supervision and scalable oversight. He achieves this result using human-defined principles, factual feedback from real-world interactions or recursive reward modeling.

More information about the Google Ph.D. fellowship program is available on its website.