Phillip Rust

Phillip Rust

About me

I am a PhD student in the CoAStaL natural language processing research group led by Anders Søgaard at the University of Copenhagen. I also collaborate closely with Desmond Elliott and the LAMP group. Recently, I was a Research Scientist Intern at Meta AI (FAIR) in Menlo Park, working with Jean Maillard. The goals of my research are to better understand the language(-and-vision) models we are using today and to develop models that exhibit strong generalization and trustworthiness. In particular, I am currently interested in self-supervised representation learning techniques, efficient model adaptation, alternatives to subword tokenization, and long-form multimodal reasoning.

My PhD is funded through a grant by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. As part of the funded project I develop robust recognition models to digitize historical handwritten records that will be used to establish a multigenerational registry of Danish family relationships.

Before my PhD, I did a master’s in computer science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where I wrote my thesis under the supervision of Jonas Pfeiffer and Iryna Gurevych.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not related to the programming language, the video game, or the home of the Europa-Park. My favorite internet cat is Floppa. I’m also a big fan of Capybaras.

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