Chang Wang

Chang Wang is a machine-learning and natural-language-processing researcher who helped build IBM Watson and founded Paper Digest. He researched machine learning and bioinformatics at Nankai University, applied SVM methods at Nebraska, and earned a computer-science PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; his 2010 thesis explored manifold alignment for transfer learning. At IBM, he focused on relation extraction and statistical knowledge-base construction for Watson, and the team received the 2013 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. He later coauthored work on medical relation extraction, worked at Elemental Cognition, and co-founded FMeasure for AI in financial analysis. Since 2022, he runs a startup in stealth mode while remaining Paper Digest's founder.

Now at: Paper Digest
Works: 192
Citations: 2,751
h-index: 27
Badges: Founder
Bridge
Wayfarer

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

1999–2004

Research at Nankai and Nebraska

From 1999 to 2002, he works as a research assistant and teaching assistant at Nankai University on machine learning for bioinformatics. From 2003 to 2004, he researches SVMs and kernel methods at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
2004–2010

A PhD thesis on transfer learning

From 2004 to 2010, he works as a research assistant and teaching assistant in UMass Amherst's Department of Computer Science. In September 2010, he completes a PhD thesis on transfer learning through manifold alignment.
2010–2015

Building IBM Watson

From August 2010 to March 2015, he is a research staff member at IBM Research's T. J. Watson center and works on Jeopardy! Watson. His work focuses on relation extraction and statistical knowledge-base construction. In 2011, he and James Fan, Aditya Kalyanpur and David Gondek publish “Relation Extraction with Relation Topics,” which uses learned relation topics and an SVM to build semantic-relation detectors.
2013

An AAAI Feigenbaum Prize

The IBM Watson team receives the 2013 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize for combining symbolic knowledge representation, natural-language understanding and statistical machine learning in real-time factual question answering. Chang Wang appears among the listed team members.
2014–2015

Medical relation extraction

In 2014, he and James Fan publish “Medical Relation Extraction with Manifold Models” at ACL. In 2015, he coauthors “Medical Synonym Extraction with Concept Space Models” at IJCAI.
2015–2018

Researcher at Elemental Cognition

From 2015 to 2018, he is a researcher at Elemental Cognition within Bridgewater Associates.
2018–2021

AI at FMeasure

From March 2018 to April 2021, he co-founds FMeasure, which develops AI for mergers and acquisitions and natural-language-processing tools for financial filings, earnings-call transcripts and company profiles.
Since 2022

Running a stealth startup

In 2018, he founds Paper Digest, an AI research platform for search, summarization, question answering and content generation. Since 2022, he runs a startup in stealth mode. Paper Digest introduces a Research Library for reading lists, profiles and lab pages in early 2026.