Weiting (Steven) Tan has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Masson Fellowship. Established in honor of the Department of Computer Science’s inaugural chair, Gerald M. Masson, the fellowship recognizes and supports selected students enrolled in the Combined Bachelor’s/Master’s Degree Program.
Masson Fellows enrolled full-time receive a 25% tuition waiver during the semester in which they are conducting research. This allows for students to transition into graduate level research following the completion of their undergraduate studies.
“I am interested in natural language processing, in general. I recently focused on machine translation for low resource languages and investigated ways to improve self-supervision techniques,” stated Tan.
Graduating with an MSE in May 2023, Tan will conduct research with Philipp Koehn, professor of computer science. Koehn currently leads a team of 20 JHU researchers that is working to develop an information retrieval and translational tool for uncommon languages around the world.
“The fellowship would sponsor me to research more on the areas that I find interesting and promising, such as self-supervision. As for professional development, it will help me better prepare for my PhD and future job applications,” said Tan.
Outside of his research areas of interest, Tan has gotten involved in extracurriculars like the badminton club as well as the ski/snowboard club.
For more information on the combined Bachelor’s/Master’s program, click here.