The list of 2024 Apple Scholars has been announced, half of them are Chinese! Penn PhD student once worked with Jim Fan to create Nvidia's most popular robot

The latest list of annual “Apple Scholars” has been announced!

Apple Machine Learning Research has just announced the list of "Apple Scholars" who will receive doctoral scholarships in 2024, which shows their research and development in the field of artificial intelligence/machine learning. Talented students are supported and encouraged.

It is worth mentioning that a total of 21 scholars won the award this year. Among them, Chinese scholars account for half of the quota, with 11 people.

The Apple Scholars PhD Scholarship is designed to reward researchers who have made outstanding contributions in the fields of computer science and engineering, from graduate students to postdoctoral levels. This scholarship aims to support and encourage innovative work in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning to advance science and technology.

Each scholarship student will receive financial support and internship opportunities while pursuing a doctoral degree, and will also be mentored by Apple researchers in the same field.

Each Apple Scholar is selected based on his or her innovative research, leadership, record of collaboration, and commitment to advancing the field.

Let’s take a look, who are the award-winning Chinese scholars?

11 Chinese scholars elected

Jie He

University of Edinburgh, Information Retrieval and Knowledge

##Jie He is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, tutored by Jeff Pan. He works to develop more reliable and accurate generative models, especially by diagnosing and evaluating model weaknesses to make targeted improvements. His recent research mainly includes "common sense reasoning and retrieval enhanced language models".

He received a master's degree from the Department of Computer Science of Tianjin University in 2022 and a bachelor's degree from the School of Software of Shandong University in 2019.

Lavender (Yao) Jiang

New York University, AI Health & Health

Lavender Jiang is a third-year Ph.D. at NYU’s Center for Data Science student, mentored by Eric Oermann and Kyunghyun Cho. Her research focuses on the safe and efficient integration of large models (LLMs) into healthcare, exploring their utility, privacy implications, and computational efficiency.

She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering and mathematical sciences from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Bowen Jin

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Information Retrieval and Knowledge

Bowen Jin is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His mentor is the famous computer scientist Han Jiawei ( Jiawei Han).

His research areas are large models, information networks and text/data mining. He is particularly interested in how language models integrate text, web, and multimodal data to solve real-world problems, including information retrieval and knowledge discovery.

He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and statistics from Tsinghua University in 2021, under the supervision of Yong Li.

Currently, Bowen Jin is maintaining a great GitHub repository about large models on graphs and summarizing a review paper.

Daogao Liu

## University of Washington, Privacy Preserving Machine Learning

##Daogao Liu is a doctoral student at the University of Washington, Seattle, under the supervision of Professor Yin Tat Lee. His research interests are in theoretical computer science and machine learning. Currently, he focuses on designing algorithms and solving (convex) optimization problems while satisfying differential privacy constraints.

He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Tsinghua University in 2020.

Yecheng (Jason) Ma

University of Pennsylvania, Embodied Machine Learning

Jason is a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, mentored by Dinesh Jayaraman and Osbert Bastani. His research focuses on the training and deployment of basic robot models, especially how to enable robots to learn from Internet-scale multi-modal data.

He received a double bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics from Harvard University.

It is worth mentioning that Yecheng (Jason) Ma is also one of the authors of Nvidia’s popular Eureka robot last year.

Renjie Pi

HKUST, Data-Centric AI

Renjie is A third-year doctoral student at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, co-supervised by Professor Tong Zhang and Professor Xiaofang Zhou. He focuses on data-centric artificial intelligence methods, including methods to improve data quality, reduce data redundancy, and automatically generate training data. Currently, he is working on problems at the intersection of large models, multimodal learning, and data generation.

He was a visiting scholar at Peking University in 2017 and an exchange student at the University of Maryland between 2018 and 2019.

Mengzhou Xia（Xia Mengzhou）

Princeton University, Speech and Natural Language

I am currently a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. My supervisor is Chen Danqi. professor. She is now a member of the Natural Language Processing Group at Princeton.

Before this, I was a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University, and my advisor was Professor Graham Neubig.

Xia Mengzhou received a bachelor's degree from the School of Big Data at Fudan University.

Mengzhou Xia's research focuses on developing powerful small-scale basic models that are affordable within academic budgets. These include developing model compression methods and efficient data selection strategies.

According to her personal homepage, a total of 3 papers were accepted by ICLR 2024 this year.

Yiming Xie

Northeastern University, Computer Vision

Yiming Xie is a third-year doctoral student majoring in computer science at Northeastern University. Her supervisor is Professor Huaizu Jiang. His research focuses on 3D computer vision, especially 3D reconstruction, perception and generation. His goal is to develop an intelligent system that unifies three-dimensional perception and generation for augmented reality (AR).

He received his bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University in 2019 under the guidance of Professor Xiaowei Zhou.

Jiayuan Ye

National University of Singapore, Privacy Preserving Machine Learning

Jiayuan is a doctoral student at the National University of Singapore, and his supervisor is Reza Shokri. She focuses on rigorous privacy analysis of learning algorithms under various threat models and tasks. Her research aims to achieve learning that ensures good privacy while retaining other desirable properties such as practicality and efficiency.

She received her bachelor’s degree from the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China in 2020.

Jieyu Zhang

## University of Washington, Data-Centered Artificial Intelligence

Jieyu Zhang is a doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington , studied under Professor Ranjay Krishna and Professor Alex Ratner. His research focuses on data-centric AI/ML, emphasizing faithful evaluation and lightweight methods. His goal is to develop efficient and effective methods to create high-quality training datasets and comprehensive evaluation benchmarks.

Prior to this, he received a bachelor's degree in computer science from UIUC, where his mentor was Jiawei Han.

Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang

University of Washington, Accessible Artificial Intelligence

Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang is a third-year doctoral student at the University of Washington, and his supervisor is Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock. His research focuses on leveraging human-AI interaction to solve real-world accessibility problems. He is particularly interested in designing and evaluating intelligent assistive technologies to make creative tasks accessible.

He received a Master of Science in CS from UIUC and was mentored by Professor Yang Wang in the SALT laboratory. Before that, he received a Bachelor of Science in CS from Zhejiang University.

Full list