Chenkai Sun
I’m expecting to graduate in December 2024 and am currently on the job market!
I am a final-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of
Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign working on Natural Language Processing with Prof. ChengXiang Zhai and Prof. Heng
Ji.
I graduated from the
University of Michigan with
a B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics, where I worked with Prof. H V
Jagadish as a research assistant. Previously I worked as a research intern at Google Gemini, Amazon
Alexa AI, and Alibaba.
Additionally, I worked at Uber's ML
Platform,
during which I developed on customized
evaluation pipeline. I also worked with Prof. Quentin F. Stout on the implementation of
Isotonic Regression
algorithms, published at CRAN.
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My research interest is focused on developing more efficient, personalized, and socially intelligent (multimodal) AI Agents. My work spans several interconnected areas:
- Efficiency: I have developed approaches to reduce the computational load of large models. For instance, I have worked on optimizing resource allocation in MoE models, and more efficient training and inference for general LLMs.
- Personalization: I have developed methods for LLMs to capture and represent user-specific characteristics, preferences, and beliefs, even when user data is limited (e.g., in cold-start scenarios).
- Social Intelligence: I am also interested in ensuring AI systems to remain aligned with societal values and avoid dissemination of toxic or manipulative content.
My research goal is to enable human-centric agents that are not only powerful in general capabilities but also aware of societal structures to make decisions that benefit society as a whole.
If you are interested in collaboration, feel free to contact me at chenkai5 [at]
illinois [dot] edu
Links:
[
Google Scholar]
[
Linkedin]
Education
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2020 - December 2024 (expected)
University of Michigan
B.S. in Computer Science and Honors Statistics, 2016 - 2020
Work Experience
-
Google (Gemini/Bard) (May 2024 – August 2024)
Research Intern
-
Amazon (May 2023 – August 2023)
Applied Scientist Intern
-
Amazon (May 2022 – August 2022)
Applied Scientist Intern
-
Alibaba (May 2021 – August 2021)
Research Intern
-
Uber (May 2019 – August 2019)
Software Engineer Intern at Michelangelo Team
Teaching (TA Experience)
-
Fall 2018, EECS 370 Introduction To Computer Organization