About
I am a research scientist at Adobe Research. I conduct interdisciplinary and applied research inspired by real-world problems, all the way from from ideation to production. I have been fortunate to lead a few research initiatives that form the foundation of several key features of the award-winning Acrobat AI Assistant, such as personalized suggested question generation and on-device document summarization. My latest research interersts/initiatives include GUI (or computer use) agents for creativity/design tasks and synthetic data/user/human. I broadly publish at ML/NLP/HCI/education venues.
I also have deep expertise and personal interest in AI technologies for education applications. My work during PhD pioneered several novel, award-winning AI methodologies for education use cases [1,2,3], some of which are patented [1] or already deployed [1]. I continue to contribute to this direction by academic collaborations [1,2] and serving as speakers, organizers, and advisors in various AI for education initiatives [1,2,3].
Collaborations and discussions are always welcome! I especially welcome internship collaborations relevant to my Adobe research interests/initiatives, and academic collaborations relevant to AI for education applications. We start to look for interns around Oct/Nov every year. Apply here.
Contact: jackwa at adobe com
News
- Nov 2025: Two papers, one on education foundation model and another one on Sycophancy Mitigation, will appear at EMNLP 2025! Thanks to all the collaborators!
- Oct 2025: I'm invited as one of the participants to the Interweaving AI, Assessment, and Accountability in Responsive Education convening organized by Menlo Education Research and the Gates Foundation. Excite to contribute to this important dialogue!
- Oct 2025: New preprint on adaptive reasoning is out! Thanks to Nigel Fernandez for leading this great work!
- Oct 2025: Our paper on mechanistic Circuits for QA, led by Samyadeep Basu will appear at COLM!
- June 2025: Our paper on diverse summarization, led by Vishakh Padmakumar, will appear at ACL 2025!
- April 2025: Persona SQ, led by Zihao Lin, will appear at NAACL 2025!
- April 2025: DocVoyager, led by Yoonjoo Lee, will appear at CHI 2025!