Biography

I am a faculty member and PhD advisor at Stevens. Previously, I was an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a faculty member and Ph.D. advisor at Tsinghua University. As a graduate student supervised by Hermann Ney from RWTH Aachen, I had fruitful visits to the NLP group in Microsoft Research (MSR) Redmond and IBM research located in Watson. I am interested in NLP and ML, having co-authored around 45 papers and 12 patents/provisional patents. I have led and participated in 18 teams to win top ranks in various NLP competitions such as machine translation. Last summer, we were glad to participate in the Alexa Prize Social Bot Challenge and received second place for improving multimodality and long-lasting conversation in chatbots.