Xin (Eric) Wang

Research

Wang aims to build intelligent multimodal AI agents that can understand the world, collaborate with humans, and perform real-world tasks—from everyday activities to high-stakes missions. His work spans multimodal representation learning, embodied AI for human-agent collaboration, and the ethical design of trustworthy AI systems. Drawing on methodologies from machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics—with insights from cognitive science and neuroscience—his research develops generalizable, efficient, and socially responsible agents that perceive, communicate, and act in complex environments.

Affiliations

UCSB Center for Responsible Machine Learning, Director

Simular AI, Head of Research

Biography

Xin (Eric) Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Barbara and the Head of Research at Simular. He also directs the UCSB Center for Responsible Machine Learning (CRML). His research interests include Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning, with an emphasis on Multimodal and Agentic AI. Previously, he was a faculty at UC Santa Cruz and also spent time at Google Research, Meta FAIR, Microsoft Research, and Adobe Research. 

Eric has served as (Senior) Area Chair for conferences such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICLR, and NeurIPS, and organized workshops and tutorials at those venues. He has received several awards and recognitions for his work, including best paper awards from CVPR and ICLR Agentic AI for Science, Google Faculty Research Award, Amazon Alexa Prize Awards, JPMorganChase Faculty Research Award, Cisco Faculty Research Awards, eBay Faculty Research Awards, AAII Interdisciplinary Research Award, and various gift awards/grants from Adobe, Apple, Snap, Microsoft, OpenAI, Cybever, Orby, etc.

Honors

J.P. Morgan Chase Faculty Research Award

Best Paper Award

CVPR & ICLR Agentic AI for Science

Google Faculty Research Award

Amazon Alexa Prize Award

Cisco Faculty Research Award

eBay Faculty Award; Cisco Research Award

AAII Interdisciplinary Research Award

Various gift awards/grants from Adobe, Microsoft, OpenAI, Apple, Snap, etc

 

Education

PhD: UCSB 

BE: Zhejiang University