Wenlong Zhao

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wenlongzhao AT cs.umass.edu

I am a Computer Science PhD student at UMass Amherst, advised by Prof. Andrew McCallum at the Information Extraction and Synthesis Lab (IESL). My research interests include scalable machine learning, customizable machine learning, natural language processing, and computational sustainability.

I completed my Computer Science master’s degree also at UMass Amherst. I had a lot of fun working with Prof. Subhransu Maji, Prof. Dan Sheldon, and ornithology researchers on developing machine learning algorithms to detect and track bird and bat roosts in weather radar data for conservation studies. I also benefited a lot from working with Prof. Mohit Iyyer and Prof. Brendan O’Connor on developing a coreference resolution dataset and a writing assistant system.

I completed my undergraduate study at UC San Diego with a major in Mathematics and Economics, a major with distinction in Cognitive Science, a minor in Computer Science, and a minor in Philosophy.

Internships

  • Red Hat, Research Scientist Intern, Summer 2025
  • IBM, Models Science Intern, Summer 2024
  • Amazon, Applied Scientist Intern, Summer 2022

Teaching Assistantships

  • Teaching assistant for UMass Amherst COMPSCI 696DS: Industry Mentorship Program, Spring 2024/25
  • Mentor for UMass Amherst COMPSCI 696DS: Industry Mentorship Program, Spring 2022/23/24/25
  • Mentor for UMass Amherst COMPSCI 696: Independent Study or COMPSCI 701 Masters Projects, Fall 2022/23/24, Spring 2024/25
  • Grader for UMass Amherst COMPSCI 611: Advanced Algorithm, Spring 2021
  • Teaching assistant for UCSD COGS 118A: Introduction to Machine Learning, Winter 2018
  • Teaching assistant for UCSD COGS 10: Cognitive Consequences of Technology, Spring 2017

Service

  • Conference Reviewer:
    • ACL Rolling Review: Dec 2023 (NAACL 2024), Feb 2024 (ACL 2024), June 2024 (EMNLP 2024), Oct 2024 (NAACL 2025), Feb 2025 (ACL 2025)
    • COLING 2022, 2024, 2025
    • ICLR 2024, 2025
    • ICML 2025
    • NeurIPS 2023 [top reviewer], 2024
    • Computational Sustainability Workshop at NeurIPS 2023
  • Organizer, Machine Learning and Friends Lunch weekly talk series at UMass Amherst, Spring 2022 – present
  • Coordinator, Information Extraction and Synthesis Lab (IESL) weekly meetings, Fall 2022 – present