PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Swabha Swayamdipta

Swabha Swayamdipta is a computer scientist at the University of Southern California who works on dataset quality and the evaluation of language models. After a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019, she spent 2019 to 2022 as a postdoctoral Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI. Papers she coauthored won a Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACL 2020, an Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2021 for MAUVE, and an Outstanding Paper award at ICML 2022 for a study of dataset difficulty. She joined USC in 2022, was named an Intel Rising Star in 2023, and became an Amazon Scholar in 2025. Today she is a Gabilan Assistant Professor at USC, where she leads the DILL Lab and serves as an associate director of the USC Center for AI in Society.

Works
126
Citations
6,320
h-index
22
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. By 2019

    A CMU doctorate

    She earns a master's degree at Columbia University and a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where Noah A. Smith and Chris Dyer advise her. She defends her thesis in May 2019.

  2. 2019–2022

    Young Investigator at AI2

    In August 2019, she joins the Allen Institute for AI as a postdoctoral Young Investigator, working with Yejin Choi at AI2 and the University of Washington. Her last day at AI2 is in July 2022.

  3. 2020

    Data Maps and an ACL honor

    She is first author of Dataset Cartography at EMNLP 2020, which introduces Data Maps, a tool that uses a model's behavior on each training example to diagnose datasets. Don't Stop Pretraining, which she coauthors with Suchin Gururangan, Ana Marasović, Noah A. Smith and others, receives an Honorable Mention in the Overall Best Paper category at ACL 2020.

  4. 2021

    MAUVE wins at NeurIPS

    She coauthors MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers with Krishna Pillutla, Yejin Choi, Zaid Harchaoui and others. The paper receives an Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2021.

  5. 2022

    ICML award and the DILL Lab

    Understanding Dataset Difficulty with V-Usable Information, written with Kawin Ethayarajh and Yejin Choi, receives an Outstanding Paper award at ICML 2022. In August 2022, she starts as an assistant professor of computer science at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and launches the Datasets, Interpretability, Language and Learning (DILL) Lab.

  6. 2023

    Intel Rising Star and CAIS role

    In September 2023, Intel selects her as one of 15 early-career academic researchers for its 2023 Rising Star Award. In November 2023, USC appoints her an associate director of its Center for AI in Society.

  7. 2025

    Amazon Scholar and Simons fellow

    She starts a 20% role as an Amazon Scholar in AWS AGI in January 2025. In spring 2025, she is a VMware Research Fellow at the Simons Institute in the Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part 2.

  8. As of October 2026

    USC professor and Amazon Scholar

    She is a Gabilan Assistant Professor in USC's Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science and leads the DILL Lab. Her research addresses dataset quality, biases in data and models, and the evaluation of language models, and she is also an associate director of the USC Center for AI in Society and an Amazon Scholar.

Career

  1. Since 2025AmazonAmazon Scholar
  2. Since 2022University of Southern CaliforniaAssistant professor of computer science
  3. 2025Simons Institute for the Theory of ComputingVMware Research Fellow
  4. 2022–2023Carnegie Mellon University
  5. 2019–2022Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Postdoctoral Young Investigator
  6. 2018–2022University of Washington

Education

  1. 2019Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD
  2. Columbia UniversityMaster's degree

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

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Swabha Swayamdipta. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Swabha Swayamdipta. 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.
  3. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Amazon. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Amazon. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

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. USC - Viterbi School of Engineering - Viterbi Faculty Directory: Swabha Swayamdipta viterbi.usc.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Faculty - Center for Computational Language Sciences: Swabha Swayamdipta dornsife.usc.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. news | Swabha Swayamdipta swabhs.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Dataset Cartography: Mapping and Diagnosing Datasets with Training Dynamics - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. AI2 Newsletter July 2020 allenai.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. NeurIPS 2021 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2022 Awards icml.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Swabha Swayamdipta Receives Intel 2023 Rising Star Award - USC Viterbi viterbischool.usc.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Swabha Swayamdipta - Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing simons.berkeley.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Swabha Swayamdipta swabhs.com. Checked 20 October 2026.