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SEAGULL

Team SEAGULL consists of students from the Situated Language and Embodied Dialogue Lab at the University of Michigan, advised by professor Joyce Chai.

By University of Michigan
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The name of SEAGULL sources from our wish to empower Situated and Embodied Agents with the ability of GroUnded Language Learning. We envision SEAGULL being capable of attending to users’ needs, following users’ instructions, collaborating with users, and continuously improving itself through interaction with users.

Team.pdf
Location: Ann Arbor, Mich.
Faculty advisor: Joyce Chai

Yichi Z. — Team co-leader

Yichi is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on situated dialogue and embodied task learning. In particular, he aims at developing (1) dialogue models for human-robot communication in embodied environments and (2) agents that can interactively learn new knowledge from such communications. Before joining UMich, he obtained his Bachelor's and Master’s degree in the department of electronic engineering at Tsinghua University.

Jianing (Jed) Y. — Team co-leader

Jed is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan. His research focuses in natural language understanding grounded to robots and physical world. In particular, he is interested in building NLP algorithms and systems to enable human-robot communication and collaboration through natural language. Before joining UMich, he obtained his Master’s in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University and his Bachelor's in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. He has also worked as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, intern and full-time.

Yuwei B.

Yuwei is a third year PhD student at the University of Michigan, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She is part of the Situated Language and Embodied Dialog Lab advised by Prof. Joyce Chai. She specializes in multimodal language acquisition, grounding, and reasoning.

Nikhil D.

Nikhil is a Master's student at the University of Michigan Robotics Institute. He is interested in robotic planning, control, reinforcement learning, embodied AI, and simulation.

Ziqiao (Martin) M.

Martin is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing (Grounded Language Understanding and Acquisition, Communication with Embodied Agents) and Machine Learning (Graph Neural Networks, Meta Learning, Semi-supervised Learning). He obtained his Dual Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at the University of Michigan and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Jiayi P.

Jiayi is a junior undergraduate student majored in Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He also works as a research assistant at SLED lab advised by Professor Joyce Chai. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing (Grounded Language Understanding and Acquisition), robotics and Machine Learning (Meta-Learning, Neural Architecture Search).

Shane S.

Shane is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research focuses around robust natural language, multimodal, and embodied inference and knowledge-supported commonsense reasoning. Specifically, he aims to understand and strengthen today’s state-of-the-art language models, which can exceed human performance on a breadth of language-related tasks, yet tend to exploit statistical biases of language data to bypass a human-level understanding. He has worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon Alexa
AI in Summers 2020 and 2021.

Keunwoo (Peter) Y.

Peter is a second-year PhD student focusing on natural language processing and cognitive architectures. Before starting his PhD program, Peter worked as a distributed systems software engineer in New York City.

Yinpei D.

Yinpei is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, with a research focus on vision and language navigation, interactive task learning, and human-robot communication. His ultimate goal is to design practical frameworks that enable robots to become an indispensable part of everyone’s household and assist them in their daily tasks. Yinpei’s academic journey began at Tsinghua University, where he completed both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. He also has industry experience as a Senior Algorithm Engineer at Alibaba.

Joyce Chai — Faculty advisor

Joyce Chai is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include natural language processing, situated dialogue, and embodied AI. Her recent work explores the intersection of language, vision, and robotics, particularly focusing on grounded language processing to facilitate situated communication with robots and other artificial agents. She is a Fellow of ACL.

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University of Michigan

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