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Location: Davis, CA, USA
Faculty advisor: Zhou Yu

Gunrock (2018)

Named for our university's mascot, Gunrock, our team is a group of students who all share a passion for improving everyday human experiences through artificial intelligence.

By University of California, Davis
5 min read
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Our team consists of 14 graduate and undergraduate computer science and electrical and computer engineering students with diverse, international perspectives. Our fearless leader is Zhou Yu, an assistant professor of computer science who was recently recognized in Forbes' 2018 30 Under 30 in Science list for her research in developing algorithms that enable software to adapt to users. Using our combined knowledge and expertise in developing large-scale distributed computing platforms, sub-systems, machine learning and application software, our team can't wait to use Amazon's platform and user pool to tackle the real-world needs of the general public.

Chun-Yen C. - Team leader

Chun-Yen was a senior software engineer with 5 years hands-on experience specializing on developing a large-scale distributed platform and scalable machine learning systems, in telecommunication company HTC. He received his master's degree in Communication Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2012.

Chun-Yen is currently a first-year master student and a Graduate Student Researcher in computer science department at the University of California, Davis. His main focus is to build a data management framework for the general usage of visualization systems and architect a robust framework for the chatbot system.

Ashwin B.

I am a Masters in Computer Science student studying at the University of California, Davis. I am a passionate programmer having a strong Data Structures and Algorithms knowledge base. In this information age, my research interest lies in Data Science/ Data Analytics. Previously, I have worked with Dell-EMC where I applied the concept of Software Defined Networking to WAN to implement an SD-WAN solution which reduced the network reconfiguration speed by 60%. My hobbies include but are not limited to sketching, writing, reading, hiking, adventure sports and exploring the unknown. I love trying out new things and having new experiences.

Austin C.

I earned my Neuroscience B.S. at University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus on psychology and cognitive science. During my undergraduate, I started learning programming and mobile app development and switched my pursuit to computer science. I have also taken coursework in machine learning and neural networks on top of my major. I am pursuing my masters in computer science at UC Davis focusing on NLP, HCI and dialogue systems and researching under Prof. Zhou Yu. My current project is a dialogue-based movie recommendation system that generates recommendation using matrix factorization and collaborative filtering.

Weiming W.

N/A

Dian Y.

I am a first year PhD student working with Prof. Kenji Sagae on dialogue systems and machine translation at University of California, Davis. We are currently working on dialogue state tracking and parsing. Besides NLP, I am also interested in computer vision. Before this, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Finance at New York University. I was advised by Prof. Keith Ross working on reinforcement learning with a focus on natural language processing, as well as researching on computer networking.

Giritheja S.

I am a first year graduate student majoring in Computer Science. I graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India in 2017 with a major in Electrical and Electronics engineering. I have previously worked as a Summer Intern in the Cloud team of Fidelity Investments. I contribute to Open Source organizations involving Software Development. My recent course project involved exploring Deep Learning techniques to recover variable names from minified javascript files, I was intrigued by applications of Deep Learning and AI. I look forward to exploring it.

Kevin J.

I earned my Computer Science B.S and Computer Engineering B.S at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the University of California, Davis I am currently working with Professor Yu Zhou for a Ph.D. in NLP and dialogue systems. My work in dialogue systems has led me to create a movie recommendation dialogue bot using collaborative filtering and matrix factorization.

Mingyang Z.

Previously, I worked with Professor Jason Corso on video activity segmentation and video classification research problem where I have experience of using sparse coding, CNN and RNN. I also did a humor classification project with Professor Rada Mihalcea to classify whether an image can pair with a humorous punchline to make good memes. Currently, I am working with Professor Yu Zhou at UC Davis for Ph.D, where I worked on the research problem of multimodality machine translation research. I implemented a sequence to sequence model and a visual semantic meaning embedding algorithm as the starting baseline model for this research.

Shreenath I.

I'm a first year Master's student at UC Davis with my areas of research being Software Engineering, Distributed Operating Systems and Machine Learning. I received my Bachelor's in Computer Science in 2015 from the University of Pune and I've worked with Fidelity National Information Services for two years as a Product Development Engineer. I have primarily worked on Python, Django, and Buildbots in a Continuous Integration environment to facilitate the build and release process. I have worked with recommendation systems and language processing before and I look forward to using my experience and building on it through this project.

Yi Mang (Terry) Y.

I am an undergraduate Computer Science major interested in artificial intelligence. Conversational artificial intelligence is enabling a natural and engaging way for people to interact with machines. It is an exciting time but creating a smart socialbot presents many challenges. For our team, I bring my experience in building full-stack software systems that integrate machine learning models. I also have research experience in applying deep learning to computer vision problems.

Antara B.

I'm a first year Master's student at UC Davis in computer science and my research interests lie in machine learning and natural language processing. I completed my undergraduate degree in computer science in 2017 from SRM University and I've worked on computer vision and NLP problems as part of my internship at Medyug Technologies.

Zhou Yu - Faculty advisor

Education: Ph.D in Language Technology Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2017

B.S. in Computer Science Department & B.A. in the Foreign Language Department with a linguistics focus in Zhejiang University, 2011

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis, 2017-present

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University of California, Davis

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