Previously, Varoon served as one of Microsoft's Data Science for Social Good Fellows, and earned his software engineering degree from UBC with a focus in machine learning. He is also a global health activist, and is a Co-ordinating Committee Fellow with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student-driven NGO focused on access to medicines issues for vulnerable and marginalized population. He has advised on global health policy and research at the World Health Organization, and is a former TEDx Speaker.
How to train dialogue models to respond with empathy and talk in a certain way
Y-Lan Boureau , Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research
Y-Lan Boureau is a research scientist at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research. She received her PhD from New York University and École Normale Supérieure (within the INRIA Willow project team), working in machine learning and computer vision. Before joining Facebook AI Research, she did postdoctoral research in experimental psychology and neuroscience at New York University, investigating self-control and meta decision making. She was one of the 2014 junior fellows of the Simons Society of Fellows. At FAIR, her work has focused on building more helpful conversations and understanding dialogue.
Arthur Spirling , New York University
Arthur Spirling is Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. He received a bachelor's and master's degree from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree and PhD from the University of Rochester. Spirling's research centers on quantitative methods for social science, especially those that use text as data and more recently, deep learning and embedding representations. His work on these subjects has appeared in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of the American Statistical Association and conference proceedings in computer science. His work have been supported by the National Science Foundation. Substantively, he is interested in the political development of institutions, especially for the United Kingdom.
Panelists: Hal Daumé III (UMD College Park and Microsoft Research) , Varoon Mathur (AI Now Institute), William Falcon (NYU)
Julia Hirschberg , Columbia University
Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She was department chair from 2012-2018. She previously worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs where she created the HCI Research Department. She served on the Association for Computational Linguistics executive board (1993-2003), the International Speech Communication Association board (1999-2007; 2005-7 as president), the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing board (1996--), the NAACL executive board (2012-15), the CRA Executive Board (2013-14), the AAAI Council (2012-15), and the IEEE SLTC 2015--. She has been editor of Computational Linguistics and Speech Communication, is a fellow of AAAI, ISCA, ACL, ACM, and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2011. She is co-chair of the CRA-W Board, and has worked for diversity for many years at AT&T and Columbia. She works on spoken language processing and NLP, studying text-to-speech synthesis, spoken dialogue systems, entrainment in conversation, detection of deceptive and emotional speech, hedging behavior, and linguistic code-switching (language mixing).
Brian McFee , New York University
Brian McFee is Assistant Professor of Music Tech-nology and Data Science New York University. He received the B.S. degree (2003) in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and M.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. His work lies at the intersection of machine learning and audio analysis. He is an active open source software developer, and the principal maintainer of the librosa package for audio analysis.
Joel Tetreault , Dataminr
Joel Tetreault is Director of Research at Dataminr, a company that provides updates on breaking events across the world in near real-time. His background is in AI, specifically Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and using techniques from those fields to solve real-world problems such as automatic essay scoring, grammatical error correction, hate speech detection, ranking user comments and dialogue systems, among others. Prior to joining Dataminr, he led research groups at Grammarly, Nuance and Educational Testing Service, and was a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs. Joel recently finished a six-year stint as NAACL Treasurer and was a long-time organizer of the Building Educational Application workshop series. He is a program chair for ACL 2020.
Panelists: Brian McFee (NYU), Joel Tetreault (Dataminr), Sam Bowman (NYU), Phu Mon Htut (NYU)
Panelists: TBA