Professor William Wang has received a prestigious 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award! William was presented the award in Washington, D.C. In the past two years, William has successfully grown the Natural Language Processing Lab into one of the most prolific NLP groups in the world. CSRankings.org ranks UCSB #3 in NLP in 2018.

The objective of the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) program is to identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions and introduce them to Department of Defense needs as well as DARPA’s program development process. The YFA program provides funding, mentoring and industry and DoD contacts to awardees early in their careers so they may develop their research ideas in the context of national security needs. The program focuses on untenured faculty, emphasizing those without prior DARPA funding. The long-term goal of the YFA program is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians in key disciplines who will focus a significant portion of their careers on DoD and national security issues.