Computing Students Awarded IBM Ph.D. Fellowships

Two College of Computing Ph.D. students are receiving recognition for their academic excellence and exceptional research potential.

IBM Research selected Yonggan Fu and Grace Guo as recipients of 2023 IBM PhD Fellowship Awards.

The program supports Ph.D. students with expertise artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud technology, quantum computing, data science, security, and the next generation of cutting-edge processors. Fu and Guo will each receive $40,000 and be paired with an IBM mentor during their fellowships.

Fu is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science. He is advised by Associate Professor Yingyan (Celine) Lin and is a member of her Efficient and Intelligent Computing (EIC) Lab.

Fu's research centers on democratizing cutting-edge AI technology on everyday devices by developing efficient and robust AI algorithms and co-designing the corresponding hardware accelerators. He focuses on efficient 3D reconstruction and efficient large language models.

“The goal of efficient 3D reconstruction is to reconstruct the 3D world on an artificial reality headset, which can enable you to do more in virtual reality,” said Fu.

Fu is interested in efficient AI because it has to capability to use AI to empower peoples’ everyday lives.

Fu says he is honored to receive the fellowship and is looking forward to what he will learn from his IBM mentor and the experience. After finishing his Ph.D., Fu hopes to work in industry continuing his work on efficient AI.

Associate Professor Alex Endert advises Guo, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing. She is a member of Endert’s Visual Analytics Lab, where he researchers AI, human-computer interaction and data visualization.

Guo has already interned at IBM, where she worked with researchers to create Causalvis, a Python library of interactive visualizations that inform casual inference — the process of drawing causal conclusions based on data.

She presented a paper on the subject at the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI) in Hamburg, Germany.

“Every time I work there, I always have a great time,” Guo said about her work with IBM. “I get a mentor who is the researcher I had interned and wrote papers with.

“It’s exciting to be exposed to a lot of new ideas. There were many experts on causal inference at IBM, so it was interesting to learn about these new methods and statistical approaches.”

Guo said she isn’t sure whether she will pursue a career in academia or industry, but her time with IBM has made her lean toward industry. If all goes well during her fellowship, it makes sense to continue her research in industry, she said.

School of Interactive Computing communications officer Nathan Deen and School of Computer Science communications officer Morgan Usry contributed to this article.