Team Bernard consists of researchers from the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego. The research directions and interests of team members cover a broad swathe of artificial intelligence algorithms and domains, including natural language processing, deep learning, data mining, and reinforcement learning. The team has a proven track-record in novel analyses of large datasets with state-of-the-art machine learning methods and developing scalable platforms therefor. As a competitor in the Alexa Prize Challenge, the team envisions a future where personal, sensible social conversational agents focus on conversational diversity and consistency in personalized dialogue.
Bodhisattwa M. - Team Leader
Bodhisattwa is a Ph.D. student, advised by Prof. Julian McAuley at UCSD. His current research focuses on various aspects in Natural Language Generation and Conversational AI tasks - personalization, dialog planning and commonsense reasoning. Prior to UCSD, he was a Research Engineer at Walmart Labs where he developed a large-scale IE system from unstructured texts and images to improve product discovery. He graduated summa cum laude from IIT Kharagpur and co-authored 10+ publications, 4 US patents, and 1 book on NLP and ML applications.
Shuyang L.
Shuyang is a Ph.D. student at UCSD advised by Prof. Julian McAuley, studying contextual text generation, recommender systems for health behaviors, and mining of large online interaction data. Previously he worked at Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs developing models and platforms for large-scale financial data acquisition, storage, and real-time anomaly detection.
Henry M.
Henry is a Ph.D. student at UCSD advised by Prof. Garrison W. Cottrell studying transfer learning and multimodal deep learning. Henry published three papers in neural music generation and interned at Amazon A9.com twice as a big data engineer and deep learning researcher. He is currently the co-founder and CTO of a tech startup in the AI space.
Jianmo N.
Jianmo is a 3rd year Ph.D. student working with Julian McAuley. He is interested in NLP and human-centric data mining. He has been working on QA and dialogue systems and did several projects along this line including open-domain QA, generative dialogue state tracking and personalized text generation.
Sophia S.
Sophia Sun is a Ph.D. student working on developing sample-efficient and reliable algorithms for reinforcement learning, advised by prof. Sicun Gao at UCSD. Previously, she worked on computational humanities (at MIT), and machine learning systems in healthcare (at Johns Hopkins University).
Julian Mcauley - Faculty advisor
Julian McAuley is an Associate Professor at UC San Diego, where he has been since 2014. His research is concerned with developing predictive models of human behavior using large volumes of online activity data.
