University of Washington graduate students, Sewon Min and Steven Golob, individually win the prestigious 2024-2025 Western Association of Graduate Schools (WAGS) and ProQuest Distinguished Master’s Thesis.
The WAGS ProQuest thesis award recognizes distinguished scholarly achievement in one of four categories, including innovation and STEM.
Sewon Min received the WAGS Innovation and Technology Award for her thesis, “Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models.” Sewon is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her thesis pioneers a new family of nonparametric language models, which rethink how we use data at scale and introduce new design tradeoffs that fundamentally change how we go about building the next generation of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.
Steven Golob received the WAGS Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award (STEM Disciplines) for his work exposing privacy vulnerabilities in generative artificial intelligence (AI). Steven is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science & Systems at the University of Washington Tacoma. His thesis investigates maintaining privacy in data sets that are synthetically generated. Steven discovered an algorithm that breaks privacy guarantees of two state-of-the-art synthetic data generation (SDG) algorithms, MST and PrivBytes, exposing vulnerabilities not previously seen.
Awardees will be honored at a special ceremony at the annual WAGS Conference in March.