Condita

The team’s vision is to provide an enjoyable user experience with professional step-by-step instructions on cooking and DIY tasks by leveraging a rich task-knowledge base, multi-modal interactions, user personalisation, and human-like fluency.

University College London - Condita.jpg
Location: London, England
Faculty advisor: Aldo Lipani

The COoking aNd DIY TAskBot (CONDITA) team consists of 6 UCL PhD students, members of the Web Intelligence group in the Dept of Computer Science and the SpaceTimeLab in the Dept of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.

The CONDITA team’s research focuses on conversational systems related topics, such as question answering, dialogue state tracking, user interaction modelling, natural language understanding, and common-sense reasoning. The team’s vision is to provide an enjoyable user experience with professional step-by-step instructions on cooking and DIY tasks by leveraging a rich task-knowledge base, multi-modal interactions, user personalisation, and human-like fluency.

Yue F. - Team leader

I'm a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, affiliated with the Web Intelligence Group of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence. I am grateful to be advised by Prof. Emine Yilmaz. I aim to design systems that robustly and efficiently learn to understand human languages and web data to the end of advancing artificial intelligence web service and web information processing. My current research interests lie in natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining.

Xiao F.

I come from China, got my Bsc degree (Physics) from Shanghai Jiaotong University. In 2019, I got my Msc degree (Information Systems) from University of Sheffield (with Distinction). I have an immense interest in learning about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Fanghua Y.

Fanghua is a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at University College London (UCL), working with Prof. Emine Yilmaz. His research interests lie in conversational AI, natural language processing, information retrieval, social network analysis, and machine learning. Currently, he is focused on task-oriented dialogue systems. He also has a strong passion in graph convolutional networks.

Zhengxiang S.

I am the first year PhD student supervised by Aldo Lipani. I previously worked on the learning to rank model, e.g. passage-level ranking model on large-scale dataset. Now I am working on relational inference in natural language.

To Eun K.

I am a final year MEng Computer Science student at UCL. My research aims at finding ways to encode human knowledge in language models and make it retrievable by question-answering and conversational systems.

Jerome R.

I am a first-year PhD student at University College London. I work with Dr. Aldo Lipani in the Web Intelligence Group. My research interests include conversational systems, natural language processing, and information retrieval. Currently, I am focused on bias in conversational systems.

Aldo Lipani - Faculty advisor

Aldo Lipani is an Asst. Prof. in Machine Learning at the University College London (UCL) and a member of the SpaceTimeLab and Web Intelligence Group. Before becoming a faculty member, he was a postdoc also at UCL, working on the project titled: “Task-Based Search Engines”. Aldo obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2018 at the TU Wien (Austria) with the thesis titled: “On Biases in Information Retrieval Models and Evaluation”, under the supervision of Allan Hanbury and Mihai Lupu. His research interest is at the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), with a focus on developing intelligent conversational systems.

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