William Wang is the Founder and CEO of Alpha Design AI, the maker of ChipAgents: an agentic AI environment that speeds up chip design and verification by 10x with your favorite code editor. ChipAgents has state-of-the-art results on NVIDIA's VerilogEval benchmark, and it is trusted by leading semiconductor companies that have shipped over 14B+ chips across the US, Europe, and Asia. For more, please visit chipagents.ai.
William Wang is also Director of UC Santa Barbara's Natural Language Processing group and Center for Responsible Machine Learning. He is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Endowed Chair Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has broad interests in Artificial Intelligence, including large language models and generative AI.
He has published more than 200 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals, and received best paper awards (or nominations) at:
- ASRU 2013
- CIKM 2013
- EMNLP 2015
- CVPR 2019
He received a:
- DARPA Young Faculty Award (Class of 2018)
- IEEE AI's 10 to Watch Award (Class of 2020)
- NSF CAREER Award (2021)
- British Computer Society - Karen Spärck Jones Award (2022)
- CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award (2023)
- IEEE SPS Simon-Pierre Laplace Award (2024)
He also received multiple:
- Google Faculty Research Awards
- IBM Faculty Awards
- Facebook Research Awards
- Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research Award
- Intel Faculty Grants
- CISCO Faculty Award
- JP Morgan Chase Faculty Research Awards
- Adobe Research Award
He frequently serves as an Area Chair or Senior Area Chair for NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. He was an elected member of IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2021–2023) and a member of ACM Future of Computing Academy.
In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community. His work and opinions appear at major tech media outlets such as:
- Wired
- VICE
- Scientific American
- Fortune
- Fast Company
- NASDAQ
- The Next Web
- Law.com
- Mental Floss
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ChipAgents
Founder and CEO
July 2024 - Present (10 months)
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UC Santa Barbara
Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair Professor in AI and Designs
June 2016 - Present (8 years 11 months)
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Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Visiting Academics
January 2022 - July 2024 (2 years 7 months)
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Carnegie Mellon University
PhD research fellow
September 2011 - May 2016 (4 years 9 months)
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Yahoo
Intern Scientist
May 2015 - August 2015 (4 months)
