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Location: Provo, UT, USA
Faculty advisor: Alan Black

Magnus

This team, consisting of PhD and Masters students from Carnegie Mellon University, brings together experience in chatbot interaction strategies, question answering, neural modeling and machine learning.

By Carnegie Mellon University
4 min read
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The team's vision is to build a social bot that can engage users in conversations apart from answering factual queries or performing everyday tasks. In order to facilitate high quality interaction with users, the conversation with the agent should evolve by leveraging mechanisms that establish coherence with user feedback and reactions. In order to engage users in a coherent manner, it would be useful if the agent plans the conversation ahead in time.

Shrimai P. - Team leader

I am a second year Master of Language Technologies student at the School of Computer Science. I am advised by Prof. Alan W. Black and Prof. Carolyn Rose. I am broadly interested in natural language processing and machine learning. Specifically, my research focuses of the various aspects of spoken dialog systems. Currently I am working on language generation for influential style of writing. Before joining CMU, I worked as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs, India on virtualization and operating systems. In my undergraduate program, I worked on building a question answering system for the semantic web.

Abhilasha R.

I am a first year student in the Master's in Language Technologies program. I am currently pursuing research in ubiquitous personal assistants and grounded semantics under Prof. Eric Nyberg. My previous research has been in problems related to parameterized complexity in Ki,j-free graphs and in analyzing social behavior through vision. I also spent a brief time in the industry. I interned at Amazon for six months, and later worked at a Computer Vision startup. My main interests lie in problems related to machine learning, NLP and algorithms.

Akash B.

I'm a graduate student who works at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. My work in these domains has appeared in top tier conferences such as ICML, EMNLP, AAAI and ITS.

Chaitanya M.

My current research focus is on incorporating external knowledge into neural machine translation. I graduated from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore last year and worked on a range of applied machine learning and NLP projects. A few of these include detecting fraud and stock price changes by building a knowledge graph from entity recognition in financial reports; a context-based recommender system for events; and behavioral modeling for traffic simulation. I am excited about conversational dialog systems and very interested in several aspects such as building context-aware systems, and semantic parsing.

Esha Ashesh K.

I am a graduate student in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science, majoring in Computational Data Science (MCDS), Analytics track. My research interests are focused towards natural language processing, dialog systems, and speech processing. I am presently assisting Prof. Alan Black in teaching the graduate level Natural Language Processing course. I also interned at Microsoft, Redmond as a Data Science Intern in Summer 2016. Before starting at CMU, I graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Goa, India with a major in computer science and engineering.

Fadi B.

N/A

Rama Kumar P.

I am currently pursuing a Master's in Language Technology in School of Computer Science, solving exciting problems in ML/NLP applied on large scale datasets! My research interests are in Big Data Analytics, Scalable Machine learning, Convex and Submodular Optimization applied in areas such as Graph mining, text analytics and Social Network Analysis. I pursued my Bachelor's and Master's at the Indian institute of Technology, Madras from the department of Electrical Engineering. I previously worked as a Research Engineer at Big Data Labs, American Express and in the Business Analytics and Math Sciences department, IBM India Research Lab, Bangalore, India.

Shivani P.

I am a Master's student in the LTI department. I work on modelling user trajectories from social media. I have also worked extensively on probabilistic models borrowing from user psychology research.

Tom M.

I am a first year Master's of Language Technologies Student. I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Spring of 2016 with a BS in computer science. While there I participated on multiple research projects with both Prof. James Hendler, and Prof. Mei Si in projects related to machine learning, question answering, and knowledge representation. Additionally I have had internships with Pinterest, LinkedIn, Bloomberg LP, and Hover Inc. Currently I am working with Prof. Eric Nyberg at CMU on automated question answering in smart home settings.

Xinrui H.

I'm a first-year graduate student in the M.S. program in Intelligent Information Systems (MIIS) at Language Technologies Institute (LTI). My research interests fall in Information Retrieval, Dialogue System and Machine Learning. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree, SUMMA CUM LAUDE from Peking University in 2016.

Zhou Y.

I am a PhD student at the Language Technology Institute under School of Computer Science, working with Prof. Alan W Black and Prof. Alexander I. Rudnicky in LTI. In Summer 2015 and 2016 I interned with Prof. David Suendermann-Oeft in ETS San Francisco Office working on cloud based mulitmodal dialog systems. In Fall 2014, I interned with Dan Bohus and Eric Horvitz in Microsoft Research working on situated multimodal dialogue systems.

Alan Black - Faculty advisor

Professor of Computer Science in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science. I am a world leader in speech synthesis, spoken dialog and speech-to-speech translations. I have over 200 referred papers, and am one of the highest cited authors in the speech community (Interspeech).

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Carnegie Mellon University

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