PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mohit Iyyer

Mohit Iyyer is a computer scientist whose natural language processing research covers long-context evaluation of large language models and the detection of AI-generated text. At the University of Maryland, he helped build the QANTA quiz bowl system in 2015, coauthored a NAACL best paper in 2016, and earned his PhD in 2017. In 2018, he coauthored ELMo, the deep contextualized word representations paper that won best long paper at NAACL. After a postdoctoral Young Investigator position at the Allen Institute for AI, he became an assistant professor at UMass Amherst, where he received an NSF CAREER award in 2021, was named a Samsung AI Researcher of the Year in 2022, and coauthored a 2023 paper that won a Distinguished Paper Award at ACM CCS. Since January 2025, he is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, where he also serves as Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence.

Timeline

  1. 2012–2017

    A Maryland PhD

    He earns a bachelor's degree in computer science at Washington University in 2012, a master's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2014, and a PhD there in 2017, advised by Jordan Boyd-Graber and Hal Daumé III. His dissertation, Beyond Sentential Language Understanding with Deep Learning, earns the 2017 Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award, shared with Srijan Kumar.

  2. 2015

    QANTA at quiz bowl nationals

    In 2015, he is a PhD student on the Maryland and Colorado Boulder team behind QANTA, a question-answering system based on deep learning that ties 200–200 with four top-ranked human players in a quiz bowl exhibition match. He also earns a best demo award at NeurIPS in 2015.

  3. 2016–2018

    Two NAACL best papers

    In 2016, he coauthors "Feuding Families and Former Friends," on unsupervised learning of dynamic fictional relationships, a NAACL best paper. In 2018, he coauthors ELMo, "Deep contextualized word representations," whose word vectors come from the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model and improve the state of the art across six NLP problems; it wins best long paper at NAACL 2018.

  4. By 2020

    Assistant professor at UMass Amherst

    After his PhD, he works as a postdoctoral Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI. By 2020, he has completed that program and is an assistant professor in computer science at UMass Amherst's Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and a member of UMass NLP.

  5. 2021–2022

    NSF CAREER and Samsung honors

    In March 2021, he receives an NSF CAREER award to work on interactive storytelling. In 2022, Samsung names him one of five AI Researcher of the Year winners, and he presents "Long-Form Language Generation" at the Samsung AI Forum in Seoul.

  6. 2023

    A CCS distinguished paper

    In 2023, he coauthors "Stealing the Decoding Algorithms of Language Models" with Ali Naseh, Kalpesh Krishna and Amir Houmansadr, which wins a Distinguished Paper Award at ACM CCS. His work also earns an outstanding paper award at EACL in 2023.

  7. 2024

    NoCha long-context benchmark

    In 2024, he releases NoCha, a long-context LLM benchmark, and gives a keynote at the Workshop on Long Context Foundation Models at ICML 2024. He also has an oral paper at ICLR 2024 on book-length summarization.

  8. Since January 2025

    Associate professor at Maryland

    In January 2025, he returns to the University of Maryland, where he earned his PhD in 2017, as an associate professor of computer science and a member of CLIP. He is also Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence. In October 2026, his group releases a demo of IdeaLens, a model for detecting whether the ideas in a text came from a human or an AI.

Career

  1. Since 2025University of MarylandAssociate Professor of Computer Science; Faculty Director
  2. Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Postdoctoral Young Investigator
  3. University of Massachusetts AmherstAssistant Professor

Education

  1. 2017University of MarylandPhD
  2. 2014University of MarylandMaster's degree
  3. 2012Washington University in St. LouisBachelor's degree

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 Mohit Iyyer. 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. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes University of Maryland. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Maryland. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Maryland. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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  1. Mohit Iyyer : Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences : UMass Amherst cics.umass.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Mohit Iyyer and Srijan Kumar awarded Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Awards for 2017 | UMD Department of Computer Science cs.umd.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Computer Quiz Bowl System Ties with Team of Top-Ranked Humans | UMD Department of Computer Science cs.umd.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Mohit Iyyer Joins Computer Science Faculty as an Associate Professor | UMD Department of Computer Science cs.umd.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Best paper awards - ACL Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [1802.05365] Deep contextualized word representations arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Mohit Iyyer — Home cs.umd.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Young investigators program | Ai2 allenai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Iyyer Named 2022 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year : Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences : UMass Amherst cics.umass.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. ACM CCS Best Paper Awards sigsac.hosting.acm.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Mohit Iyyer | College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences | University of Maryland cmns.umd.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.