Mark Yatskar
About
I am an Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania in the department of Computer and Information Science. I did my PhD at University of Washington co-advised by Luke Zettlemoyer and Ali Farhadi. I was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence for several years working with their computer vision team, Prior. My work is interdisciplinary, spanning Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Fairness in Machine Learning. I received a Best Paper Award at EMNLP for work on gender bias amplification (Wired article). My research broadly explores how language can be used to structure visual perception. I work on machine learning approaches that enable tight coupling between how people express themselves in language and how machine behavior is specified. A central thread in my research is trying to understand how machine learning systems inherit human bias.
Research Performance Summary
First Recorded Paper
For the sake of simplicity: Unsupervised extraction of lexical simplifications from Wikipedia
Year: 2010
Citations: 228
Venue: Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North
Latest Recorded Paper
Purely Agentic Black-Box Optimization for Biological Design
Year: 2026
Citations: 0
Venue: arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22382
Last 10 Years Publication Activity
This timeline shows the professor's yearly publication activity.