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Location: Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Faculty advisor: David Jurgens

Audrey

Each with our own experiences and unique value, we plan to tackle the challenge of creating an active listening, heartwarming, and understanding social bot.

By University of Michigan
4 min read
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Audrey is a conversational agent that engages users through active listening and mutual storytelling. We are a tightknit team of 7 master’s students and 5 undergraduate students from the University of Michigan with expertise in natural language processing, machine learning, software engineering, and human-computer interaction. We are working with Professor David Jurgens in the School of Information and Nikola Banovic from Computer Science. Each with our own experiences and unique value, we plan to tackle the challenge of creating an active listening, heartwarming, and understanding social bot.

Chung Hoon H. - Team leader

Chung Hoon is a second year data science master’s student at the University of Michigan. His research has been broadly in areas of machine learning and deep learning with particular focus on applications such as image caption generation, solar flare prediction, and neural decoding of myoelectric signals. Chung Hoon interned at LLamasoft in 2019. For the Alexa Prize Competition, he will focus on leading the team and natural language generation using deep learning.

Arushi J.

Arushi is a Master's student in Information in the Data Science track. Arushi's previous NLP experience include story generation via the GTP-2 model, Airbnb Reviews text mining, and LSTM text generation. She will focus on natural language generation. She has been fortunate enough to work with many Universities as a Research Collaborator like Rutgers University, Virginia Tech and UCLA in the fields of Social Computing, and Machine Learning.

Yuan L.

Yuan is a masters student in Data Science studying at the University of Michigan. Passionate about machine learning and deep learning, and with a strong background in terms of data structure and algorithms their studies mainly focus on an interest in natural language processing. Previously, they have joined projects about commonsense inference, image captioning, etc. Yuan used to work as an algorithm intern focusing on implmenting and deploying many NLP models and algorithms on the cloud platform at Tencent, where they got a deeper understanding on several amazing deep learning frameworks.

Junjie X.

Junjie is a master student at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science and Engineering, working with Prof. H.V. Jagadish at UM DBGroup. Generally speaking, Junjie's research interest includes Data Management, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Knowledge Representation, etc.

Ryan D.

Ryan is an undergraduate Compuer Science major and will focus on software engineering. His expereince primarily comes through Ai competitions, such as Halite and Terminal, and robotics, such as FRC and Robonation's Robooat competition.

Vihang A.

Vihang is a masters student with reserach interests in the field of Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning and Computer Vision. Projects include developing a virtual pet-sitter which localizes pets and recognizes activity through security cameras, investigating exploration strategies for reinforcement learning and caption generation for images. Vihang's interests in the Alexa Prize involve working on the dialogue policy to develop chatbots that can actively listen.

William C.

William is a sophomore computer science student at Michigan. With a passion for computer vision and natural language processing, William has worked on previous projects with fellow team member Zhizhou to create products such as trAnSLate, an American Sign Language translator. He is currently interning at Taiwan Artificial Intelligence Labs, working on testing and improving a series of medical imaging models that seek to identify diseased areas from medical images. William is extremely excited about the competition and the advances that it will bring to the artificial intelligence realm.

Sagnik R.

Sagnik is a former software engineer pursuing a masters in machine learning with a penchant for natural language processing and computer vision.

Yujian L.

Yujian is a senior student majoring in Computer Science at the University of Michigan with academic interests broadly in AI and ML, particularly in RL and decision making. On team Audrey, Yujian is on the sub-team of ML and mainly responsible for the team's personal understanding model.

Yucen S.

Yucen is an undergraduate student in Computer Science whose research interests are closely related with smart agents: human-computer interaction with machine learning and modelling human behaviour. Yucen focuses on dialog system architecture and integration, especially the cold-start problem, as well as user experience design on team Audrey.

Zhizhuo Z.

Zhizhuo is a maker. He is interested in creating new and interesting things with the latest technology, whether that'd be for something fun or useful. His latest project is an American Sign Language translator that translates hand gestures from a smartphone camera to words via a deployed convolutional neural network.

David Jurgens - Faculty advisor

David is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and B.A. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. His research combines NLP, sociolinguistics, and data mining to discover, explain and predict human behavior in large social systems. His research has been published in top venues such as PNAS, WWW, ACL, ICWSM, EMNLP, and won awards such as the Cozzarelli Prize, Cialdini Prize, best paper at ICWSM, and best paper nomination at ACL.

About the Author
University of Michigan

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