André Duarte, a newly admitted student at CMU Portugal Dual Degree Ph.D. Program in Language Technologies (class of 2024/2025) has been awarded the SPARK Award for the best PhD student article. The Ceremony took place during the Center for Responsible AI Forum 2024, in Porto, on November 19th.
The SPARK Awards are the first Responsible AI Student Awards, launched to distinguish projects in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, and other fields advancing responsible artificial intelligence. André Duarte’s article “DE-COP: Detecting Copyrighted Content in Language Models Training Data”, was selected among 44 academic submitted projects. This research focuses on developing DE-COP, a method to detect whether copyrighted content was used in training a language model by probing it with multiple-choice questions containing verbatim and paraphrased text, achieving significant performance improvements over existing methods, even on black-box models.
According to André, this prize represents “a sweet conclusion for the DE-COP project. It’s always great to have our work recognized by others!”
About enrolling in the Ph.D. program, André states “I hope that five years from now, I will be just as motivated as I am today to continue working in the AI field.”
The CMU Portugal Ph.D. candidate is hosted in Portugal at Instituto Superior Técnico and INESC ID, supervised by Arlindo Oliveira and at Carnegie Mellon by Lei Li.
Read André Duarte’s article here.
