Skip to content

Bio for Invited Talks

Zhijing Jin (she/her) is a Ph.D. at Max Planck Institute & ETH. Her research goals are two-fold: (1) to expand the impact of NLP by promoting NLP for social good, and (2) to improve NLP models by connecting NLP with causal inference. She is co-supervised by Prof Bernhard Schoelkopf at Max Planck Institute (main supervisor), Prof Rada Mihalcea at University of Michigan (as a mentor), and Prof Mrinmaya Sachan and Prof Ryan Cotterell (co-supervision through ELLIS program) at ETH Zürich. She has published at many NLP and AI venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING, NeurIPS, AAAI, AISTATS). Her work has been cited in MIT News, ACM TechNews, WeVolver, VentureBeat, and Synced. She is actively involved in AI for social good, as the organizer of NLP for Positive Impact Workshop at ACL 2021 and EMNLP 2022, and RobustML workshop at ICLR 2021. To support the NLP research community, she organizes the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program. To foster the causality research community, she organized the Tutorial on CausalNLP at EMNLP 2022, and served as the Publications Chair for the 1st conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR). More information can be checked on her personal website: zhijing-jin.com

Photo for Talks or PR

Here is my profile photo: [my default clean profile photo]. Depending on the context, if a larger photo is needed, feel free to use this half-body photo.

More Personal Info

With a goal to do life-long research on languages and human intelligence, my long-term goal is to be a professor and actively promote AI for social good. When thinking of the best path to pursue social good, I sympathize with theories with the following characteristics: can pass scientific thinking, have solid philosophical grounds, model the world as a complex system, and acknowledge that the bottom line is survival of humanities in a pragmatic way, although beyond survival there can be many various models of prosperity of humanities. In addition to these principles, I also understand that doing good needs a powerful community. So far in the discrete space of choices and my skill set, I find Effective Altruism (EA) to be the best fit, a social movement to involve people in doing good effectively with a scientific approach.

Prior to my PhD, I was a research intern at Amazon AI (2019-2020), supervised by Prof Zheng Zhang, Prof Xipeng Qiu and Dr. David Wipf. Previously, I obtained my bachelor’s degree (1st Class Honors) from the University of Hong Kong with my bachelor thesis supervised by Prof Benjamin Kao. I published during my undergrad 5 NLP papers at top conferences (incl. AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAHPM). During undergrad, I had visiting semesters at MIT and National Taiwan University. For most of my papers during undergrad, I worked remotely with the Clinical Decision Group of Prof Peter Szolovits at MIT CSAIL, and I also worked on NLP algorithms and applications to clinical decisions, with Enrico Santus at MIT and Prof Charlotta Lindvall at Harvard Medical School.

Here is my Goodreads account.

My Motivations

My long-term mission is to fight for all people’s reasonable access to survival and pursuit of what they love (in Chinese: 为天地立心，为生民立命，为往圣继绝学，为万世开太平).

My short-term mission is to do as good research as possible, so that I won’t have any regrets in my academic career path.

My deep interests: epistemology (the science of science and all things we do), AI for decision-making (including policy making, organizational design, and life coaching; I really like this newsletter). Feel free to contact me for interdisciplinary research.

What drives me? I am genuinely interested in finding patterns behind things (e.g., science, specifically epistemology), and leading changes to make things better (e.g., social good, specifically decision-making including policy making, organizational design, and life coaching). Feel free to contact me for inter-topic research.

For intellectual discussions: To understand “what is science” and “what is the farthest that human knowledge can reach”, I welcome curiosity-driven discussions with people with any of the following knowledge: philosophy, history of science, math, physics, group theory, continuous symmetry, Komolgorov complexity (and MDL), etc.

My Languages

  • English (1st* by the total number of speakers)
  • Mandarin (2nd)
  • German (12th)
  • Japanese (13th)
  • Yue Chinese/Cantonese (17th)
  • Wu Chinese (21th)
  • Literary Chinese (used in 1300BC-1949AD)

*Statistics from Ethnologue (Mar 2019)

People I Respect

  • Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell (for their mastery of philosophy + math/physics + other insightful opinions on life and the world)
  • Montesquieu (for envisioning insightful, sustainable political systems), George Orwell (for spreading the political philosophy through easy-to-read novels)
  • Jesus, Buddha (for being strong spiritual leaders)
  • Judea Pearl, Nassim Taleb (for being a thought-breaker, and paradigm-shifter)
  • Rada Mihalcea, Mister Rogers (for being extremely kind, considerate, and humanitarian)
  • Stuart Russell (for leading a thinking trend in both academia and society, and managing to have so many talents to follow his insights)
  • Steve Jobs (for designing and promoting great tech devices that change lives)
  • Interesting figures in Chinese history: Xuanzang 玄奘 (for strong will power, firm belief, debate skills, multilingualism, ability to spread his tenants), Zhang Zhidong 张之洞 (for being a solid traditional literati, and strong politician with an open mindset when the western people opens China).

More About me

*More info: My Chinese name is 金致静. I graduated from the key class (1507届科创班) at No.2 High School of East China Normal University (华东师大二附中), Shanghai, China. Other alumni of my high school include Prof Jiajun Wu 吴佳俊 (Stanford), Zuyu Ding 丁祖昱.