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Location: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Faculty advisor: Bonnie Webber

Edina

We are Edina, from the University of Edinburgh, a world-leading institution in Artificial Intelligence.

By University of Edinburgh
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The team puts together 8 PhD students from different areas—natural language processing, machine learning and robotics—to reach one goal: creating a socialbot that is able to converse with a human in a natural, fun and engaging way. We are excited to be part of this challenge, and we cannot wait to show you what we come up with.

Federico F. - Team leader

I am currently a 3rd year PhD student researching topics related to computational semantics. In particular I am interested in negation detection and its representation across different languages. In the past, I have researched in other areas such as Statistical Machine Translation and psycholinguistics. I believe my research, being at the intersection of lingustics and computer science, can be a valid asset to the team. I also hold an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Korean Linguistics from The Academy of Korean Studies.

Ben K.

I am a 2nd year PhD student supervised by Steve Renals and Iain Murray. My topic is generative sequence modelling with recurrent neural networks. My particular interests are creating more expressive neural architectures, and designing cost functions that result in generation of more realistic data.

Daniel D.

My PhD research deals with recommending contextually relevant citations to authors of scientific papers. I frame this as an information retrieval problem and I am currently exploring term weighting by applying automatic annotation of document text using existing argumentation schemes. My upcoming line of work will be on using neural sequential models for keyword extraction. Previously, I have worked on natural language generation for the semantic web and I have founded a couple of start-up companies, one developing software and the other one a hardware product, taking one of them through a 3-month accelerator programme.

Emmanuel K.

PhD candidate in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, specialising in perception, reasoning and understanding for autonomous systems. Experience in Deep Learning, Probabilistic Programming, Topological Data Analysis and Underactuated Robotics (Humanoids, Drones and Wheeled Robots). Member of the Robust Autonomy and Decisions (RAD) research group in the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour (IPAB) at the Informatics Forum, Edinburgh University. Member of the Edinburgh Centre of Robotics.

Jianpeng C.

I am a PhD student, affiliated with the ILCC. My research lies between machine learning and natural language processing. My interests include natural language generation, summarisation, parsing, question answering and program induction. A long-term goal is to develop natural language processing techniques with indirect or weak supervisions. My tools are statistics, Bayesian models and deep learning. Before coming to Edinburgh, I obtained my MSc from the University of Oxford and BEng from the National University of Singapore.

Joachim F.

I received a B.Mus. Tonmeister from Surrey University in 2014, earning an industry prize for the best technical project on perceptually plausible sound source localisation and separation. In 2015 I completed an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University, focussing on machine learning, NLP and speech processing. I'm currently pursuing a PhD at Edinburgh, with a focus on factorised neural network adaptation techniques for multi-domain speech recognition. Previously I have worked as an audiovisual and acoustics consultant for the theatre consultant Charcoalblue. I am excited about creative and productive outlets for machine learning research, particularly in text, speech and music.

Marco D.

I'm a PhD student at ILCC of the School of Informatics. My supervisor is Shay Cohen. My research focuses on Machine Learning techniques for Natural Language Processing (NLP). I'm looking into fast and accurate Semantic Parsing with Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). Prior to my PhD, I accomplished a MSc at The University of Edinburgh (UK) in Artificial Intelligence and a MSc at The University of Genoa (Italy) in Software Engineering.

Mihai Sorin D.

I hold a BSc degree in Robotics with Artificial Intelligence from University of Bradford, where I received the best overall performance award. I did a placement year at IBM, working on the technology that currently powers the IBM Internet of Things initiative. I am currently doing a PhD in Computer Science. My research is pushing the boundaries in deep learning and reinforcement learning applied in highly complex games.

Bonnie Webber - Faculty advisor

At Edinburgh, I work on discourse phenomena, collaborating on the development and use of the Penn Discourse TreeBank. I am also interested in discourse in the context of machine translation and the stability of language technology tools across changes in genre.

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