PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Akari Asai

Akari Asai researches language models that search for evidence and use it to produce grounded answers. She studied economics and business at the University of Tokyo, discovered computer science while studying abroad at UC Berkeley, and completed a University of Washington Ph.D. in 2025. Her work spans Self-RAG's self-reflection, OpenScholar's search over scientific papers, and Ai2's fully open Olmo 3 models. She received the IBM Fellowship in 2022, was named to MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan in 2024, and shared the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2025. She is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and a research scientist at Ai2, where she leads the deep research agent team; she was named a 2026 AI2050 Early Career Fellow.

Works
60
Citations
2,477
h-index
24

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2022–2025

    A path into computer science

    In 2022, she is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, advised by Hannaneh Hajishirzi. She studies economics and business at the University of Tokyo before changing majors and discovering computer science while studying abroad at UC Berkeley. She earns a B.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and completes her UW Ph.D. in 2025.

  2. 2022

    An IBM Ph.D. Fellowship

    In 2022, she receives the IBM Fellowship; her research focuses on question answering, multilingual NLP and NLP efficiency.

  3. 2023

    Self-RAG adds reflection

    In 2023, she and her coauthors introduce Self-RAG, which adaptively retrieves passages and uses reflection tokens to review its own generations.

  4. 2024

    OpenScholar for scientific literature

    In November 2024, she releases OpenScholar with collaborators at UW and Ai2. The model searches scientific papers and grounds its generated answers in those sources.

  5. 2024

    Innovators Under 35 in Japan

    In 2024, MIT Technology Review names her to its Innovators Under 35 Japan list for work on retrieval-augmented language models.

  6. 2025

    A shared dissertation award

    In 2025, she shares the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award with Noah Golowich for Beyond Scaling: Frontiers of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models.

  7. 2025

    Joining Ai2 and Olmo 3

    In July 2025, she joins Ai2 as a research scientist. In December 2025, she coauthors Olmo 3, a fully open family of 7B and 32B language models released with its full model-building flow.

  8. Since 2026

    Professor at Carnegie Mellon

    In fall 2026, she joins Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute as an assistant professor, with a courtesy appointment in Machine Learning. She is also a research scientist at Ai2, where she leads the deep research agent team. In October 2026, she is named a 2026 AI2050 Early Career Fellow.

A language model matched the links in this timeline to people, organizations and papers (provisional, model-judged).

Career

  1. Since 2026Carnegie Mellon UniversityAssistant Professor
  2. Since 2020Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Research Scientist
  3. 2020–2022University of Texas at Austin

Education

  1. 2025University of WashingtonPh.D.
  2. University of TokyoB.E.

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention2020 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · 620 citationsWith Yuji Matsumoto
  2. When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories2023 · Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) · 326 citations
  3. Wikipedia2Vec: An Efficient Toolkit for Learning and Visualizing the Embeddings of Words and Entities from Wikipedia2020 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations (EMNLP) · 164 citationsWith Yuji Matsumoto
  4. Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question Answering2019 · 152 citationsWith Richard Socher
  5. XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering2021 · Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) · 114 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  3. The median h-index is 55 at universities and 20 at frontier AI labsIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. The median h-index is 55 at universities and 20 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, citations and moves to estimate how universities and frontier labs contribute to AI research.
  4. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 112 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 112 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Lost in translation no more: IBM Fellowship winner Akari Asai asks — and answers — big questions in NLP to expand information access to all news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. Akari Asai | EECS Rising Stars 2022 risingstars.utexas.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. Akari Asai akariasai.github.io. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. Scientific literature synthesis with retrieval-augmented language models allenai.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. news | Akari Asai akariasai.github.io. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. ‘Working to solve global problems’: Allen School Ph.D. student Akari Asai named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  8. AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award - AAAI aaai.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  9. Akari Asai - AI2050 ai2050.schmidtsciences.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  10. Olmo 3 arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  11. Asai, Fried Named 2026 AI2050 Early Career Fellows lti.cmu.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.