Stanford
University
Department
of
Computer
Science
·
School
of
Engineering
Gates
Computer
Science
Building
353
Jane
Stanford
Way
Stanford
,
CA
94305
Tel
: (650) 723-2300
January
15, 2025
Office
of
Graduate
Admissions
Massachusetts
Institute
of
Technology
77
Massachusetts
Avenue
Cambridge
,
MA
02139
Re
:
Letter
of
Recommendation
for
Priya
Narayanan
—
Ph
.
D
.
in
Computer
Science
Dear
Members
of
the
Admissions
Committee
,
It
is
with
genuine
enthusiasm
that
I
recommend
Priya
Narayanan
for
admission
to
the
Ph
.
D
.
program
in
Computer
Science
at
MIT
.
I
have
known
Priya
for
over
two
years
in
my
capacity
as
Associate
Professor
of
Computer
Science
at
Stanford
University
,
where
she
served
as
my
primary
research
assistant
in
the
Computational
Linguistics
and
Information
Retrieval
(
CLAIR
)
Lab
from
September
2022
through
December
2024.
Over
the
past
decade
,
I
have
supervised
more
than
forty
undergraduate
and
master
'
s
-
level
researchers
.
Priya
ranks
comfortably
in
the
top
three
.
She
joined
my
lab
to
work
on
low
-
resource
neural
machine
translation
,
and
within
her
first
quarter
she
identified
a
critical
flaw
in
our
data
augmentation
pipeline
that
the
rest
of
the
team
—
including
two
senior
Ph
.
D
.
students
—
had
overlooked
.
Her
proposed
fix
,
a
contrastive
back
-
translation
strategy
she
called
CBT
-
Align
,
improved
BLEU
scores
on
Yorùbá
–
English
by
4.7
points
and
became
the
foundation
of
a
paper
we
published
at
ACL
2024,
on
which
Priya
is
first
author
.
Priya
graduated
summa
cum
laude
with
a
3.96
GPA
,
earned
the
Departmental
Award
for
Outstanding
Undergraduate
Research
,
and
completed
graduate
-
level
coursework
in
statistical
learning
theory
and
advanced
NLP
,
earning
A
or
A
+
in
every
class
.
Beyond
academics
,
she
contributed
to
Stanford
'
s
AI
Safety
Reading
Group
,
where
she
organized
a
well
-
attended
panel
on
alignment
in
large
language
models
.
I
am
confident
that
Priya
possesses
the
intellectual
depth
,
technical
rigor
,
and
collaborative
spirit
to
thrive
in
MIT
'
s
doctoral
program
.
She
is
,
without
reservation
,
one
of
the
strongest
candidates
I
have
recommended
in
my
career
.
Please
do
not
hesitate
to
contact
me
if
you
require
any
additional
information
.
Sincerely
,
Dr
.
Elena
Vasquez
Associate
Professor
of
Computer
Science
Stanford
University
evasquez
@
cs
.
stanford
.
edu
· (650) 723-4218
1 / 1
