December 3, 2021
Doctoral student Peter Hase was awarded a 2021 Google PhD Fellowship in natural language processing. The fellowship covers up to three years of tuition and fees, plus a stipend to be used for living expenses, travel, and personal equipment. As part of the fellowship, Hase will also be paired with a mentor from Google Research.
The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to “recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields.” Students must be nominated by a university, and no university may nominate more than four students. Hase is one of 75 recipients worldwide and only 30 recipients from the U.S. in 2021. He is one of only six recipients worldwide in natural language processing.
Hase is part of the Multimodal Understanding, Reasoning, and Generation for Language (MURGe) Lab at UNC, where he is advised by John R. & Louise S. Parker Associate Professor Mohit Bansal. Bansal said of Hase, “I am very proud of Peter’s well-deserved recognition based on his impactful work in the field of explainable AI, and I look forward to the ground-breaking future work that this prestigious fellowship will support.”
Hase’s research focuses on interpretable machine learning and natural language processing, particularly techniques for explaining model behavior and aligning machine learning systems with human values. In the past, he has worked on methods for explaining text classifiers’ decisions, as well as protocols for evaluating explanations of models. This research has been published at conferences including ACL, EMNLP, and NeurIPS. He is also a member of the Royster Society of Fellows in the UNC Graduate School.