Ziqiao ‘Martin’ Ma awarded Weinberg Graduate Fellowship in Cognitive Science

Ziqiao “Martin” Ma, a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering, has been selected to receive a graduate fellowship from the U-M Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. Created in 2014, the Weinberg Institute aims to advance cognitive science through research, teaching, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Graduate fellowships are awarded to a select number of students who have shown exceptional research progress in areas related to cognitive science, from psychology to artificial intelligence (AI).

Martin has a record of exemplary research in AI and cognitive science, particularly related to psycholinguistics, multimodal learning, and language grounding in AI models. His work has already yielded several papers, one of which won Outstanding Paper Award at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the top conference in computational linguistics.

The Weinberg Graduate Fellowship will support Martin’s continued research on human-inspired language acquisition and cognitive modeling for embodied AI agents. His recent work focuses on the development of strategies that use vision-language pre-training to help AI models better acquire language grounding abilities. He has also explored whether incorporating corrective feedback improves language learning in AI models.

“Martin has immense intellectual curiosity on a broad range of topics in cognitive science and embodied AI,” said Prof. Joyce Chai, Martin’s PhD advisor. “The Weinberg Fellowship not only recognizes his existing contributions but will also enable him to delve further into the connection between cognitive development and embodied AI.”

Martin works in the Situated Language and Embodied Dialogue (SLED) lab in CSE with Prof. Chai. He is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science through the Weinberg Institute. Prior to pursuing a PhD, he obtained a dual bachelor’s degree in computer science at U-M and electrical and computer engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.