Junyuan Hong and Feng (Jeff) Liang have been named MLCommons Rising Stars for 2024. MLCommons Rising Stars are awarded for students "who have demonstrated excellence in Machine Learning (ML) and Systems research and stand out for their current and future contributions and potential."

Feng Liang is a Ph.D. student in Texas ECE and is supervised by Prof. Diana Marculescu. His current research interests lie in vision-language models and generative AI with a special interest in efficiency.

Junyuan Hong is a postdoctoral fellow hosted by Prof. Atlas Wang in the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML) in Texas ECE. His research interests lie at the intersection of responsible artificial intelligence (AI) and real-world applications, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. He is deeply motivated by the challenge of imbuing responsible AI systems with privacy, robustness, security, and ethics, to ensure their functionality is reliable and their operations respect individual rights and societal norms.