Zhijing Jin receives honorable mention for the Wilhelm Schickard Dissertation Award

Tübingen – Zhijing Jin, a postdoc in the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS), receives honorable mention for the Wilhelm Schickard Dissertation Award. The award honors the legacy of Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635), a renowned hebraist, astronomer, mathematician and cartographer. He is also the inventor of the first calculator. By offering this award, the university continues to foster doctoral excellence and impactful advancements in the field of computer science.

In her dissertation “Causality for Natural Language Processing”, Zhijing Jin explores the intricate role of causal reasoning in advancing the capabilities of large language models. Given the crucial importance of causal reasoning for human cognition and intelligent decision-making, inducing and examining causal inference in large language models serves as a pivotal role of this work. Jin’s thesis expands its scope to understand the underlying mechanisms of causal reasoning, and broader implications of causal and anti-causal learning for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Real-world applications of this work encompass the realm of text-based computational social science by assessing political decision-making processes and the evaluation of scientific impact through citation analysis. Through the development of novel datasets, benchmark tasks, and groundbreaking methodological frameworks, this research not only identifies critical challenges but also highlights opportunities for enhancing the causal reasoning capabilities of large language models, setting the stage for future advancements in this crucial and dynamic area of study.

Zhijing Jin completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Bernhard Schölkopf, the Director of the Empirical Inference Department at MPI-IS, directly after completing her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong due to her research excellence. She is currently an ELLIS advisor; an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada’s leading research institution; a faculty member of the Vector Institute; and a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Her prominent work on artificial intelligence, large language models and causal inference has received wide recognition across multiple accolades including three Rising Star awards, two Best Paper Awards at NeurIPS 2024 Workshops, as well as several fellowships at Open Philanthropy and the Future of Life Institute. Her work is reported in CHIP Magazine, WIRED, and MIT News, and she received wide recognition by the NLP community, taking senior service roles such as Senior Area Chairs, and Member of the ACL Ethics Committee.