YWCC Makes an Impact at AAAI Conference 2025
Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) was a notable presence at the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence during the month of March. Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean for Research and External Relations Guiling “Grace” Wang served as Sponsorship Chair for this year’s event, in addition to co-coordinating YWCC’s sponsorship of the AAAI Student Hackathon with Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Brook Wu and serving as one of 10 Women Mentors for the women mentoring lunch program.
She, furthermore, along with her Ph.D. candidate and lead author, Junyi Ye, had a paper published by AAAI titled “Assessing the Creativity of LLMs in Proposing Novel Solutions to Mathematical Problems.” Ye was subsequently invited to present the paper as an oral presentation, a distinction reserved for only approximately 4.6% of submissions.
Wang and Wu were joined at the conference by Dean Jamie Payton along with fellow faculty members Distinguished Professor Zhi Wei, Professor Hai Phan, Assistant Professors Mengnan Du and Lijing Wang, and Senior University Lecturer Lin Lin.
YWCC alumni members Dezhi Wu, a former student of Wu’s and currently a full professor at South Carolina University, and Hao Liu, an assistant professor at Montclair State University, were also in attendance.
Remarking on the AAAI Hackathon sponsorship, Dean Payton said, “Aside from the success of the event itself, it increased visibility for YWCC as a changemaker in the evolution of AI.”
The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 featured technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, among other activities.