PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kai-Wei Chang

Kai-Wei Chang is a UCLA computer scientist who studies trustworthy language processing and multimodal AI, from debiasing word embeddings to vision-language models and math benchmarks. He studied at National Taiwan University, earned a PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, and joined UCLA's Computer Science Department in 2017 after a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England and an assistant professorship at the University of Virginia. Papers he coauthored include a 2016 study of gender stereotypes in word embeddings, the 2017 EMNLP Best Long Paper "Men Also Like Shopping," VisualBERT in 2019, GLIP (a CVPR 2022 Best Paper Finalist), and the MathVista benchmark in 2023. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2021, was named one of IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's 10 to Watch for 2024, and joined UCLA teams that won a DARPA expMATH contract and a Laude Moonshots grant for AI mathematics in 2026. Today he is a professor of computer science at UCLA, co-director of the UCLA DataX AI Technology Center, and president of SIGDAT for 2026.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2003–2015

    Illinois PhD and a KDD award

    He studies at National Taiwan University, taking two B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from 2003 to 2007 and an M.S. in computer science from 2007 to 2009. He then earns a PhD in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying there from 2010 to 2015. In 2010, "Large Linear Classification When Data Cannot Fit in Memory," coauthored with Hsiang-Fu Yu, Cho-Jui Hsieh and Chih-Jen Lin, wins a KDD Best Paper Award.

  2. 2015–2017

    From Microsoft Research to UCLA

    He is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England from 2015 to 2016, then an assistant professor in the University of Virginia's Computer Science Department from 2016 to 2017. In 2017, he joins UCLA's Computer Science Department as an assistant professor.

  3. 2016–2017

    Gender bias in word embeddings

    In 2016, he coauthors "Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings" with Tolga Bolukbasi, James Zou, Venkatesh Saligrama and Adam Kalai; it shows that embeddings trained on Google News articles carry gender stereotypes and offers a method to remove them. In 2017, "Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints," coauthored with Jieyu Zhao, Tianlu Wang, Mark Yatskar and Vicente Ordonez, wins the EMNLP Best Long Paper Award.

  4. 2019–2023

    VisualBERT, GLIP and MathVista

    In 2019, he coauthors VisualBERT, a framework that stacks Transformer layers to align text with image regions for vision-and-language tasks. The GLIP paper, "Grounded Language-Image Pre-training," is a Best Paper Finalist at CVPR 2022. In 2023, he coauthors MathVista, a benchmark of 6,141 examples that tests the mathematical reasoning of foundation models in visual contexts.

  5. 2021

    A Sloan Research Fellowship

    In February 2021, he is one of four UCLA faculty members, among 128 scholars in the United States and Canada, selected for a Sloan Research Fellowship. As an assistant professor, he leads a research group that develops statistical approaches to make human language-processing technology more efficient, robust, inclusive and fair.

  6. 2024

    IEEE AI's 10 to Watch

    IEEE Intelligent Systems names him among its 2024 recipients of the AI's 10 to Watch award, for work on trustworthy natural language processing and on reliable, responsible and robust large language models and their multimodal variants. By February 2025, he is also an Amazon Scholar at Amazon AGI.

  7. 2026

    AI for mathematics grants

    In March 2026, UCLA is selected for DARPA's expMATH program, and the ALPHA team, led by Wei Wang and including him, wins a three-year, $5 million grant to build AI tools for formal mathematical proof. In April 2026, he is also on the six-person UCLA team, led by Amit Sahai and including Terence Tao, that receives a $250,000 Laude Institute Moonshots seed grant to build an AI research partner for mathematics.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor and SIGDAT president

    He is a professor of computer science at UCLA and co-director of the UCLA DataX AI Technology Center. In 2026, he is president of SIGDAT, the organizing body behind EMNLP, after serving as vice president in 2025.

Career

  1. Since 2017University of California, Los AngelesAssistant Professor
  2. 2016–2017University of VirginiaAssistant Professor
  3. 2015–2016Microsoft ResearchPostdoctoral Researcher
  4. AmazonAmazon Scholar

Education

  1. 2015University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignPhD
  2. 2009National Taiwan UniversityM.S.
  3. 2007National Taiwan UniversityB.S.

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Kai-Wei Chang. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Kai-Wei Chang. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Kai-Wei Chang yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Kai-Wei Chang | UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering samueli.ucla.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Awards - Kai-Wei Chang web.cs.ucla.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Four UCLA faculty members awarded 2021 Sloan Research Fellowships newsroom.ucla.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. 2024 Recipients of AI's 10 to Watch computer.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. UCLA Team Awarded $5 Million DARPA Contract to Develop AI for Math Advancement samueli.ucla.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. UCLA Computer Scientists, Mathematician Terence Tao Awarded Laude Moonshots Grant to Build AI System as Research Partner samueli.ucla.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Kai-Wei Chang web.cs.ucla.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Kai-Wei Chang | Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing simons.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.