Honors and awards  |  UW Notebook

March 19, 2025

Faculty/staff honors: Best paper, collaborative innovation, young investigator award

Recent recognition of the University of Washington includes the best paper award at NeurIPS Pluralistic Alignment Workshop, Scialog: Early Science with the LSST Collaborative Innovation Award and 2024 AVS Thin Film Young Investigator Award.

Professor wins ‘best paper’ at NeurIPS Pluralistic Alignment Workshop

Max Kleiman-Weiner, assistant professor in the UW Foster School of Business, received the $1,000 Best Paper Award on Pluralistic Alignment at the NeurIPS 2024 Workshop.

The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, is one of the most influential conferences in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science and is known for its rigorous peer-review process.

Kleiman-Weiner co-authored the paper, “Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems,” which introduces the MultiTP dataset — a collection of moral dilemmas in over 100 languages that enables the assessment of large language models’ decision-making in diverse linguistic contexts. The analysis explored the alignment of 19 LLMs with human judgments across six moral dimensions.

“By examining moral decisions across over 100 languages, we discovered that language models often fail to capture the rich diversity of human moral preferences across cultures,” Kleiman-Weiner said. “This reinforces why pluralistic alignment — ensuring AI systems can understand and respect different cultural perspectives — is so crucial as we develop these technologies. I’m excited about this work because it pushes us to think critically about whose values AI systems reflect. … We hope this research encourages more work on building AI systems that serve all of humanity, not just a select few.”

Nora Shipp receives Collaborative Innovation Award

Nora Shipp, UW assistant professor of astronomy, was part of one of eight interdisciplinary teams awarded the Collaborative Innovation Award in the first year of Scialog: Early Science with the LSST.

This initiative, launched by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, is a three-year program designed to support early-career scientists as they prepare to utilize data from the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

“Scialog has been a great opportunity to make connections with scientists across the field of astronomy to brainstorm new ideas for taking advantage of the unprecedented data that will soon be provided by the LSST,” said Shipp.

Shipp’s proposal brings together researchers to study stars and dark matter — not just in the Milky Way, but also in smaller galaxies. By using the LSST to reveal the faint outer regions of these galaxies, the research will help us to better understand the universe’s creation and the limits of how galaxies form.

Scialog, which is short for “science + dialog, “is a collaborative program launched by RCSA in 2010. It’s designed to accelerate breakthroughs by fostering a network of creative scientists across disciplines and encouraging intensive discussions on scientific themes of global importance.

As part of this initiative, the conference brought together an expert group of scientists and facilitators, including Eric Bellm, research associate professor of astronomy and DiRAC Institute Fellow, to guide the discussions.

Chemical engineering professor wins 2024 AVS Thin Film Young Investigator Award

David Bergsman, UW assistant professor of chemical engineering, has been named the 2024 recipient of the American Vacuum Society (AVS) Thin Film Division Paul Holloway Young Investigator Award. Named in honor of Professor Paul H. Holloway, a distinguished scholar and contributor to AVS, the award recognizes young scientists for significant theoretical and experimental contributions to thin film research.

Bergsman studies how to deposit layers of plastic that are 1/1000 the thickness of a human hair, which he uses to develop better materials for computer processors, clean energy, and water purification.

“The American Vacuum Society was foundational to my growth as a young scientist,” Bergsman said. “I am deeply honored to receive this award from a community which has always been an inspiring and supportive environment. I’m excited to continue engaging with this network of scientists and pushing the boundaries of research in interfacial engineering, surface science, thin films, and related technologies.”

Tag(s): College of Arts & Sciences • College of Engineering • David Bergsman • Department of Astronomy • Department of Chemical Engineering • Foster School of Business • Max Kleiman-Weiner • Nora Shipp

---