I am honored to be nominated by the SIGDAT executive board, the organization that oversees EMNLP, to run for the VP-elect position. This position spans a three-year term, with roles progressing from VP-elect in 2024 to Vice President in 2025, and President in 2026.
I want to seize this moment to share my vision for SIGDAT and EMNLP. I’m also proud to run with other awesome candidates Mohit Iyyer, William Wang, and David Jurgens. We share simliar values and a goal of making our community better.
If you’ve attended EMNLP in the past 3 years, please check your email to vote.
Statement
The rapid growth and widespread use of NLP technology present significant challenges and opportunities for SIGDAT and its EMNLP conference. If elected I envision focusing on the following directions:
(1) Fostering Inclusion and Diversity: I am committed to making EMNLP a friendly environment, where researchers from different backgrounds, disciplines, cultures, seniority levels, and geographical regions feel valued, safe, and heard. Along this direction, I will support researchers facing financial constraints in attending EMNLP and accessing its materials. I will also explore strategies to lower language barriers for non-native English speakers, fostering a more inclusive conference experience.
(2) Empowering Young Researchers: I would like to highlight the research accomplishments of young faculty, junior scientists, and students to enhance their visibility and foster their success. This may include launching an early-career track to showcase the work of rising stars and introducing dissertation awards to honor their significant contributions.
(3) Bridging Academia and Industry/non-profit organization: I aim to strengthen the connection between academic and industrial participants by facilitating collaborative initiatives, panels, workshops, and hiring that address shared challenges and opportunities. One potential approach is to establish a poster session specifically for students and young researchers on the job market to showcase their work.
(4) Reimagining Conference Structure and Engagement: With the number of participants increasing both in-person and virtually, the traditional conference format has its limitations. I plan to engage with the community to gather ideas and transform EMNLP into a more interactive and accessible event. Potential ideas include enhancing offline discussion on the virtual conference platform, dedicating a specific date to virtual poster sessions to boost participation, and rethinking the conference presentation formats.
Bio Sketch
Kai-Wei Chang is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Additionally, he is an Amazon Scholar at Amazon AGI. His primary research interests are focused on improving the fairness, robustness, inclusivity, and interpretability of natural language processing, along with developing multimodal solutions for visual-language applications. Kai-Wei has received several awards, including AAAI Senior Membership (2023), Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), Google Research Scholarship (2021), and multiple best/outstanding paper awards. Kai-Wei graduated from the National Taiwan University in 2009, received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in 2016.
Over the past few years, I’ve served as the AC/SAC of several conferences, including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, and AAAI. I was the Associate Program Co-Chair for AAAI 2023, Ethic Co-Chair for NAACL 2022, and Demo Co-Chair for NAACL 2024. I co-organized Structured Prediction for NLP in 2016-2017 and the Trustworthy NLP workshop in 2021-2024. I am currently an action editor for JAIR and ARR. Drawing from these experiences and my active participation in EMNLP over the last decade, I am prepared to tackle the current challenge and embrace the opportunities to advance our field.
For more detailed information, please visit http://kwchang.net.