The Siebel Scholars Foundation announced the 2023 Siebel Scholars class, recognizing nearly 100 students in bioengineering, business, and computer science. From Illinois CS, students Gargi Balasubramaniam, Emmanuel Gallegos, Ryan Marten, Samraj Moorjani, and Xueqing Wu were selected for this year’s class.

Through this program, this formidable group brings together diverse perspectives from business, science and engineering to influence the technological, policy, economic and social decisions that will shape the future.

“Each year, Siebel Scholars continue to impress with their academic commitment and impact on future societies. It once again represents the best minds in the world,” said Thomas M. Siebel, President of the Siebel Scholars Foundation. “It gives me great pleasure to welcome these students to this ever-growing, lifelong community, and I personally look forward to seeing their impact and contribution manifested.”

To date, more than 1,700 Siebel Scholars have driven innovation in more than 12 industries, launched more than 1,100 products, authored more than 420 patents, and published more than 42 books and 3,936 patents, according to the Sibel Scholars Foundation. has published more than 100 articles or book chapters. We manage over $2.8 trillion in assets.

Congratulations to the following Illinois CS students:

Garji Balasubramaniam

Gargi Balasubramaniam is a second year MS student working with Professor Han Zhao in the field of transfer learning. Balasubramaniam’s research focuses on making machine learning (ML) systems trustworthy, making them more robust in the real world through representation learning and causal-rooted domain generalization techniques. We aim to Prior to joining the UIUC, Balasubramaniam graduated from his BITS Pirani in Goa, India as a gold medalist.

Balasubramaniam has contributed to her field through recent publications at UAI ʻ22 and research internships at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, American Express ML and AI. Gargi used to work for Microsoft and now she is an intern at Meta Reality Labs. She is recognized for her academic and synthetic performance by her two prestigious national awards, KC Her Mahindra Fellowship (granted to only her four students in India) and her JN Tata Scholarship. Approved.

Emmanuel Gallegos

Emmanuel Gallegos is a graduate student and research assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, collaborating with Dr. Nancy Amato at the Parasol Lab on distributed computing for multi-agent tasks and motion planning. He graduated from California State University East Bay in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science degree.

His previous work includes publications related to deep learning, computer vision and thermal imaging for fever detection aimed at increasing situational awareness about Covid-19. Gallegos also worked as a Principal Software Engineer at T’ena Health Technologies, a technology start-up led by Dr. Charmayne Hughes, with the goal of bringing modern medical technology to developing countries. His work at T’ena Health Technologies helped the company secure funding from his COVID-19 Africa Rapid Grant Fund.

Ryan Marten

Ryan Marten is an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of his Hoiem AI Lab and recently led a team of five to create a new benchmark for evaluating computer vision models across multiple tasks and datasets. Marten is currently a research intern at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, designing novel architectures for general-purpose visual and language systems.

Previously, Marten was a Laidlaw Leadership and Research Scholar and received a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. While at the University of Toronto, he completed his research projects at the Dickinson Vision Lab, Dynamic Graphics Project Lab and Vector Institute. Marten is a visiting research intern at the Torr Vision Group (University of Oxford) and he is at the CSAIL Graphics Group (MIT).

Samraj Mujani

Samraj Moorjani is a prospective MSc student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His primary research interest is in leveraging natural language generation to combat misinformation and make scientific knowledge more accessible. He is currently working on Natural Language Generation for Persuasive Texts with Professor Hari Sundaram. He is also working with Professor Wen-mei Hwu to integrate a faster sparse matrix multiplication kernel into his PyTorch to speed up inference on large language models.

Moorjani worked on artificial intelligence applied research at Facebook to improve multilingual, multimodal product taxonomy. She is currently on the She Ad Privacy and Responsibility team at Meta. She also served as a course assistant in Software Design Studio, Algorithms and Models of Computation, and Computational Advertising.

Wu Xueqing

Xueqing Wu is a first year master’s student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a member of her BLENDER lab in collaboration with Professor Heng Ji. Before that, she completed her bachelor’s degree in 2020 from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Her research interests lie in knowledge-aware natural language processing, information extraction, and generative language models. She has 3 publications and a total of 6 publications as the lead author of her top conferences (ICML2021, ACL2022, NAACL2022). She also has extensive industry experience, including internships at Microsoft Research Asia (2019-2020), ByteDance AI Lab (2020-2021), and IBM Research (this summer).