August 26, 2019
First-year computer science doctoral student Peter Hase was awarded the Royster Society of Fellows Recruitment Fellowship by the UNC Graduate School. The fellowship provides full tuition cost, health insurance, and funds for professional travel for five years, as well as a $24,000 stipend for two years and a partial-stipend for three to encourage external fellowships. Beyond funding support, key benefits of membership in the society of fellows also include interdisciplinary learning, networking, and professional development and social opportunities. Among these is the opportunity to teach an interdisciplinary seminar for first-year undergraduates.
The Royster fellowship program selects students with the highest academic potential and the most impressive record of achievement in undergraduate education and work and life experiences. It is the University’s most selective and prestigious interdisciplinary fellowship program.
Hase’s research interests lie in developing interpretable machine learning methods, with a focus on the domain of natural language processing (NLP). An important goal of this research is the design of machine learning systems that make decisions in a way that is transparent to people and open to scrutiny. He will be working on these kinds of problems at UNC with professor Mohit Bansal in the UNC-NLP Lab.
Hase previously received a bachelor’s degree in statistical science from Duke University, where he did research on interpretable computer vision techniques and algorithmic poetry generation with professors Cynthia Rudin and Sayan Mukherjee. His work on interpretable computer vision will be published this year at the 2019 AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP). He attended Duke as a recipient of the AJ Tannenbaum Trinity Scholarship, a four-year merit scholarship. As an undergraduate student, Hase was also heavily involved with the school’s Effective Altruism club, a student group whose mission is to build an enabling community for students who are trying to find careers where they can improve the world. After leading Duke’s club for two years, he now plans to work with UNC’s chapter.
For a full list of current fellows, visit the Graduate School website. For more information about Peter, visit his webpage.