Mohit Iyyer to Join UMD’s Department of Computer Science

Mohit Iyyer will join the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science as an associate professor, marking a return to the institution where he earned his Ph.D. in 2017. His research centers on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, focusing on improving the capabilities and applications of large language models (LLMs).

“I’m very happy to return to UMD’s CS Department as a faculty member,” Iyyer said. “I’m particularly excited to collaborate with the many faculty and students, both in and outside of CS, who are working on interesting AI research projects.”

Iyyer’s research addresses the limitations of LLMs and explores ways to enhance their instruction-following abilities for long-form text generation. His research includes designing methods to evaluate multilingual and extended text, developing collaborative systems for assisting human authors in creative writing tasks and increasing the robustness of LLM-generated text detectors against adversarial attacks.

“My current research aims to develop methods to measure and improve the capabilities of large language models, particularly on tasks that require understanding and generating long pieces of text,” Iyyer said. “This research has applications in educational settings, such as helping students improve their writing skills, and we also explore applications for low-resource languages as opposed to focusing exclusively on English.”

Iyyer’s interest in the intersection of AI and creative writing stems from his time as a Ph.D. student at UMD, where he was a member of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by the question of whether, and if so, how, a computer can write an engaging story,” he said. “As a Ph.D. student at UMD, my advisors were nice enough to let me explore related questions, and as a faculty member, I have continued doing so with my own students.”

After completing his Ph.D., Iyyer pursued a postdoctoral research position at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and later served as a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Iyyer’s achievements include best paper awards at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) in 2016 and 2018, an outstanding paper award at the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) in 2023, and a best demo award at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference in 2015. He was also named Samsung’s AI Researcher of the Year in 2022.

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications