I am Zhecan Wang (James), a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Columbia University, with my graduation slated for May 2024. I am eagerly applying for your institution's faculty position related to Multimodal Learning, Commonsense Reasoning, Human-in-the-loop, Human-AI-interaction, Human-centered AI, and AI for X. I am privileged to receive primary mentorship from Prof. Shih-fu Chang, Dean of the Engineering School at Columbia and an ACM Fellow. I also have the fortune of co-advisement by Prof. Kai-Wei Chang, a renowned Amazon Scholar at UCLA.

Research Interest: My research during my Ph.D. program has been funded by the DARPA Machine Common Sense (MCS) Program. It has focused on artificial intelligence, particularly Multimodal Learning (e.g., vision and language.), Commonsense Reasoning and Human-in-the-Loop. My early works involved extracting and representing multimodal knowledge, supervising models’ learning for commonsense reasoning, enhancing the explainability of models, forming closed-loop feedback mechanisms with humans, and evaluating their real-world performance. I am expanding my research direction to incorporate multimodal knowledge into Human-in-the-Loop, Human-AI Interaction/System, and Human-centered AI studies. I aim to elevate AI towards human-level cognition by incorporating diverse modalities, including acoustic and biometric data, and harnessing active and passive human feedback in new learning paradigms.

Academic Excellence and Leadership: As a principal contributor to DARPA MCS program, I've led significant collaborative projects with top universities, achieving top performance on the DARPA leaderboards. My leadership skills were further highlighted by guiding a 12-student team to first place in the ICCV Microsoft Global MS-Celeb-1M Challenge. Since beginning my AI research in 2014, I've published 23 papers in top-tier conferences, secured 8 AI-related patents, and amassed 800+ citations. At Columbia, I have contributed 14 papers to prestigious venues, serving as the first or co-first author on 8 of them, and my work has been acknowledged by organizations such as PaperWeekly, AI2, and DARPA.

Service to the Department and Community: As Head Representative for the Computer Science Department at the Engineering Graduate Student Council, I've led housing transparency initiatives and organized professional events, underscoring my commitment to a vibrant academic community. Additionally, I serve as the reviewer and Program Committee Member for conferences like CVPR, AAAI, etc., and as a research committee member for Columbia's In Transcription Club.

Awards and Recognition: My academic journey has been marked by significant achievements, including receiving the AAAI-22 Student Scholarship and leading my team to victory in the ICCV MS-Celeb-1M challenge. These accolades, alongside my research consistently delivering state-of-the-art results over multiple Vision-Language Understanding benchmarks, underscore my capability for making groundbreaking contributions to the field.

Professional and Internship Experience: At Columbia University, for academic internships, I participated in an internship research project at Google Brain/DeepMind, working in the multimodal team (Bard & Gemini) led by Dr. Quoc V. Le. In addition, I have also been involved in a collaborative research project at Microsoft Research as an intern researcher under the team led by Dr. Lu Yuan. Before joining Columbia, I worked as a full-time AI researcher at XPeng Motors’ research center in Silicon Valley, where I was the only undergraduate full-time staff member accepted. During this time, I was directly mentored by Dr. Yan Dongguo (former Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research). Before that, I was guided at the LV lab at the National University of Singapore by Prof.Jiashi Feng and Prof. Ashraf Kassim. During this period, I participated in a collaborative project between Panasonic's AI Lab and NUS and won first place in all categories of Microsoft's 2017 One-Million Celebrity Human Face Competition.

Early Educational Background: I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in 2018 (a young engineering school spun out of MIT and ranked third in undergraduate engineering education by US News) as the fourth International Chinese student in the school history. During my undergraduate years, I received a four-year tuition scholarship and was the campus ambassador for collaboration among three colleges (Babson, Olin, and Wellesley Colleges). Thanks to the school's cooperative mechanism, I also had the freedom to explore cross-registration at MIT, Wellesley College, and Babson College.

Leadership

• Lead Department Representative at the Engineering Graduate Student Council (EGSC). 

• Co-founder of HackIT, an online non-profit engineering education platform    

Honor

• 1st place in all sub-categories of ICCV 2017 Microsoft Global Challenge of Recognizing One Million Celebrities in the Real World (MS-Celeb-1M) hosted by  Microsoft Research. One of the world’s top competitions with the largest data set for large-scale classification and low-shot problem

• Receiver of AAAI-2022 Student Scholarship Program

• Reviewer of ICCV 2019, NeurIPS 2019, AAAI 2019, CVPR 2020, ECCV 2020, AAAI 2020, NeurIPS 2020, WACV 2020, ACCV 2020, AAAI 2021, CVPR 2021, ICCV 2021, ARR 2021, NeurIPS 2022, AAAI 2022, WACV 2022, EMNLP 2022, CVPR 2022, MM 2022, ARR 2022, ICLR 2023, AAAI 2023, MM 2023, NeurIPS 2023, AAAI 2023, WACV 2023, EMNLP 2023, ARR 2023, AAAI 2024,  WACV 2024 and ICLR 2024.

• Invited to meet the Prime Minister of Denmark and participate in the cultural exhibition.   

• 1st place at the 2nd Facial Landmark Localisation Competition - The Menpo BenchMark, hosted by iBUG (Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group), Imperial College London

• Travel Grant at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2017

• Recipient of 4-year Olin College Tuition Scholarship

• Two Golden Key and two Silver Key Awards(State-level) for oil painting and carving

• Outstanding Intern Reporter Award, Strait Metropolis Daily (the biggest press  in southeastern China)

Reference

Education

• Columbia University

  Doctoral program (current)

• Master of Science

• Olin College of Engineering

  • Originated from MIT;

  • Ranked by MIT Study as the Global State of the Art in Engineering Education;

  • Ranked as the top 3 best undergraduate engineering school by U.S. News;

  • 4th Chinese International student in school’s history.

  Bachelor of Science in Engineering, with a Concentration in Computing

• National University of Singapore (exchange and visiting UROP research)

• MIT, Wellesley College and Babson College (cross-registration)

• American Heritage School (Top 10 private and #1 for math in the nation) 

• Slagelse Gynasium (biggest high school in the mid Denmark area)

Passionate about

• Machine Learning, Multi-Media and Robotics

• Entrepreneurship, Product/Market Fit

• Being Creative and Making Impacts

Interesting Facts of me

• Was visited privately by Prime Minister of Denmark

• Wrote a book about my gap year of hitch-hacking and volunteering

• Had been one of the very few male students at Wellesley College