People

Faculty affiliates

Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on grounded and embodied semantics, language generation and Q&A/dialogue, and interpretable and generalizable deep learning.

Sara Copic is a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at UNC, where she received her PhD. She works at the intersection of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Her research focuses on explaining how we can be semantically competent even if we are mistaken about fundamental reality. 

Henry Fuchs is the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UNC. He heads UNC’s Graphics and Virtual Reality Research Group, and has been active in 3D computer graphics and computer vision, with rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), high performance graphics hardware (Pixel-Planes), office of the future, virtual and augmented reality, telepresence, and medical applications.

Thomas Hofweber is a professor of philosophy at UNC and the director of the AI Project. He works in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mathematics, with a particular emphasis on ontology and on the role of conceptual and linguistic representation in metaphysics. He regularly teaches a class entitled “AI and the future of humanity”.

Marc Niethammer is a professor of computer science at UNC with a joint appointment in the Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC). His research is in biomedical image analysis with a particular focus on methods for statistical shape analysis, image segmentation, deformable image registration, and machine learning.

Katya Pertsova is a professor of linguistics at UNC. Her research is focused on morphology and computational linguistics.

James Pryor is a professor of philosophy at UNC. He works in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

Rebecca Walker is a professor of philosophy and a professor of social medicine at UNC. Her research focuses on biomedical research including animal research, phase I healthy volunteer research, and genomic advances. She also works on topics in health care ethics including distributive justice and concepts of autonomy. 

Graduate student affiliates

Myraeka D’Leeuwen is a PhD student in the philosophy department at UNC. She is interested in animal ethics, philosophy of technology, and decision theory. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Philosophy from Northeastern University, and she is the AI Project RA.

Peter Hase is a fourth-year computer science PhD student in the UNC-NLP lab, where he is advised by Mohit Bansal. His work at UNC is supported by a Google PhD Fellowship and previously by a Royster Fellowship. His research interests center on interpretable machine learning and natural language processing. He is particularly interested in techniques for explaining model behavior and aligning ML systems with human values.

Thomas Mattessich is a PhD student in philosophy from Connecticut with an MA in Philosophy from Brandeis University and a BS in Computer Science and Philosophy from The College of William and Mary. At the moment, he is particularly interested in philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Aaron Thieme is a PhD student in philosophy at UNC, whose main areas of interest are in value theory and epistemology. He is particularly interested in moral theory and in the badness of death for its victims. 

Simon Varey is a PhD student in the philosophy department at UNC, whose primary research interest is formal semantics. He received a BA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne and an MPhil in philosophy from the University of Sydney. He also holds a certificate in computational linguistics from UNC. His dissertation concerns the use of corpora in the philosophy of language.

Xiang Zhou is a 5th-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science, UNC-Chapel Hill, working with Mohit Bansal. His current research interest lies in understanding and improving the generalizability and robustness of NLP models. He is curious about what it takes to build a model that processes and understands language just like a human (or even better).