Sap Awarded 2025 Okawa Research Grant

LTI Assistant Professor Maarten Sap received the prestigious award for his work in socially-aware artificial intelligence

Maarten Sap, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, has received a 2025 Okawa Research Grant to support his research in the area of socially-aware artificial intelligence (AI) with structured social world models.

Sap is one of seven academics in the U.S. this year to receive the prestigious award from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications, which was founded in 1986 with the goal of promoting and supporting research and development in the field of information and communications technology. The foundation presents its research grant each year to a select group of researchers across Japan, China, South Korea and the U.S.

Sap’s work is focused on ethical AI development, including  enhancing natural language processing (NLP) systems with social intelligence and understanding social biases in language models. A first-time Okawa grant recipient, Sap said that he was excited for the opportunity to further explore ways to improve the safety and ethics of AI tools.

“As AI systems and LLMs are increasingly deployed in public facing applications, they still lack social intelligence, e.g., failing to understand who knows what in conversations, and who should know what,” he said. “This grant will support my work towards enabling better social intelligence in LLMs for improved usability, safety, and privacy.”

Visit the Okawa Foundation's website for more information about the research grants.