Aaron Chan
PhD Candidate at USC • Research Intern at Meta AI • chanaaro [at] usc [dot] edu
Hi! 
I’m a computer science PhD candidate in the INK Lab at the University of Southern California (USC), where I’m advised by Prof. Xiang Ren. I’m also a member of USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI).
My research is at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. In particular, I’m excited about:
- model explainability: explaining language model behavior more faithfully, plausibly, and efficiently.
- explanation-based learning: operationalizing explanations to improve language model decision-making.
Currently, I’m working as a research intern at Meta AI, on the AI Integrity Team. Previously, I was a hardware engineering intern at Google, on the Android Camera Team.
Before coming to USC, I earned a master’s degree in robotics from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
On a personal note, I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC and now live with my wife in Los Angeles, CA. Outside of work, you might find me playing/watching basketball (go Wizards!), skiing, hiking, board gaming, or foodie-ing (
). Plus, I’m a huge fan of the TV shows Seinfeld and BoJack Horseman.
News
| Jan 10, 2022 | In Spring 2022, I’m a TA for CSCI 566 (Deep Learning and its Applications) at USC. |
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| Dec 16, 2021 | A preprint of my Meta AI intern project, UniREx, has been published on arXiv. |
| Dec 09, 2021 | I’ll be presenting SalKG today at NeurIPS 2021. Come chat with me at Poster Session 7! |
| Sep 28, 2021 |
Our SalKG paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2021! 
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| Sep 20, 2021 |
I started my research internship at |
| Jul 31, 2021 | This summer, I had an awesome time mentoring Wyatt Lake, as part of USC’s SHINE program. Check out Wyatt’s project on explanation-based regularization of BERT models. |
| Jun 08, 2021 |
I passed my PhD qualifying exam and am now a PhD candidate! 
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