We are an ambitious, driven, group of computer science engineers who are working to improve the quality of artificial intelligence with the Amazon Alexa Prize. We aim to bridge the gap between conversational and digital communication to meet the demands of our users. Our team invites you to learn more about our journey that led to the creation of our conversational social bot.
TEAM GUNROCK (2019)
ZHOU YU (FACULTY ADVISOR)
I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, University of California, Davis. I am the director of the Language, Multimodal and Interaction Lab. I recieved my PhD at Language Technology Institute under School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Alan W Black and Prof. Alexander I. Rudnicky.
Education: Ph.D in Language Technology Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2017 B.S. in Computer Science Department & B.A. in the Foreign Language Department with a linguistics focus in Zhejiang University, 2011 Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis, 2017-present |
KAI-HUI LIANG (Team lead)
Kai-Hui was a senior software engineer with 3.5 years of hands-on experience developing mobile applications, Android-based WiFi speaker and task-oriented voice assistant at a software company, Sixnology. Before that, she received an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University.
Currently, she is a first-year Master’s student in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are in HCI, machine learning and NLP. She is working with Professor Zhou Yu on a multimodal educational dialog system, aiming at helping children learn a second language.
Currently, she is a first-year Master’s student in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are in HCI, machine learning and NLP. She is working with Professor Zhou Yu on a multimodal educational dialog system, aiming at helping children learn a second language.
DIAN YU
I earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Finance at New York University. I was advised by Prof. Keith Ross working on reinforcement learning with a focus on natural language processing, building language model, as well as researching on computer networking. I also worked with Prof. Azza Abouzied on information extraction and text alignment with the help of human-computer interaction. Currently, I am working with Prof. Kenji Sagae for a Ph.D. in natural language understanding and machine translation.
MINGYANG ZHOU
Mingyang Zhou is a second year Ph.D student at University of California, Davis with the research interest of building intelligent system with multi-modalities including vision and language. Prior to coming to UC Davis, he gained a Master Degree from the University of Michigan. He worked with Professor Jason Corso on video temporal segmentation and video classification research problem. He attended the Alexa Prize Challenge 2018 as a team member of the Gunrock, who was responsible for designing the sports and food subsystems of the chatbot.
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SAM DAVIDSON
Sam Davidson is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at UC Davis, focusing on computational language modeling and natural language processing. Specifically, he is working on projects involving grammatical error correction in Spanish, dependency parsing of ASR output, and paraphrase generation.
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AUSTIN CHAU
Austin is a second year Master’s student at the University of California, Davis. He earned his undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has worked on cognitive science and cognitive psychology research. He is currently a student of Prof. Zhou Yu. His current research includes template-based natural language generation and dialog personalization based on context and user attributes. He was a team member of Gunrock of the Alexa Prize Challenge 2018 and was responsible for the template manager, game, and fashion module of the chatbot.
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ISHAN JAIN
Ishan is a first year master’s student at University of California, Davis. His areas of interest include Software Engineering, Machine Learning and is intrigued by the challenges in the NLP field, especially in creating a smart socialbot. He received his Bachelor’s in 2016 from VIT University and then worked for Ericsson’s Research and Development team as a Software Engineer. He looks forward to exploring and contributing in the field of NLP.
YU LI
I am a first-year graduate student working with Dr. Zhou Yu at the University of California, Davis. Before this, I earned my B.S. in Communication at Zhejiang University and my Master’s degree in Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University. My research interest is NLP and dialog systems. I am responsible for the dialog state manager and topic selection module. Based on the utterance features and user profile, I will use machine learning and NLP technologies to select the proper topic subsystem for the chatbot.
JOSH ARNOLD
MENGXIAO LIN
Xueyuan Lu
TEAM GUNROCK (2018)
Zhou Yu (Faculty advisor)
I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, University of California, Davis. I am the director of the Language, Multimodal and Interaction Lab. I recieved my PhD at Language Technology Institute under School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Alan W Black and Prof. Alexander I. Rudnicky.
Education: Ph.D in Language Technology Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2017 B.S. in Computer Science Department & B.A. in the Foreign Language Department with a linguistics focus in Zhejiang University, 2011 Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis, 2017-present |
Chun-Yen (Arbit) (Team lead)
Chun-Yen was a senior software engineer with 5 years hands-on experience, specializing in developing a large-scale distributed platform and scalable machine learning systems in telecommunication company, HTC. He received his master’s degree in Communication Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2012.
Chun-Yen is currently a first-year masters student and a Graduate Student Researcher in computer science department at the University of California, Davis. His main focus is to build a data management framework for the general usage of visualization systems and architect a robust framework for the chatbot system. Personal Website: http://itsarbit.com |
ASHWIN
I am a Masters in Computer Science student studying at the University of California, Davis. I am a passionate programmer, having a strong Data Structures and Algorithms knowledge base. In this informational age, my research interest lies in Data Science/ Data Analytics. Previously, I have worked with Dell-EMC where I applied the concept of Software Defined Networking to WAN to implement an SD-WAN solution which reduced the network reconfiguration speed by 60%. My hobbies include but are not limited to sketching, writing, reading, hiking, adventure, sports, and exploring the unknown. I love trying out new things and having new experiences.
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AUSTIN
I earned my Neuroscience B.S. at University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus on psychology and cognitive science. During my undergraduate, I started learning programming and mobile app development and switched my pursuit to computer science. I have also taken coursework in machine learning and neural networks on top of my major. I am pursuing my masters in computer science at UC Davis focusing on NLP, HCI and dialogue systems and researching under Prof. Zhou Yu. My current project is a dialogue-based movie recommendation system that generates recommendation using matrix factorization and collaborative filtering.
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Antara
I'm a first year Master's student at UC Davis in Computer Science, and my research interests lie in machine learning and natural language processing. I completed my undergraduate degree in computer science in 2017 from SRM University and I've worked on computer vision and NLP problems as part of my internship at Medyug Technologies.
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Dian
I am a first year PhD student working with Prof. Kenji Sagae on dialogue systems and machine translation at University of California, Davis. We are currently working on dialogue state tracking and parsing. Besides NLP, I am also interested in computer vision. Before this, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Finance at New York University. I was advised by Prof. Keith Ross working on reinforcement learning with a focus on natural language processing, as well as researching on computer networking.
GirithejA
I am a first year graduate student majoring in Computer Science. I graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India in 2017 with a major in Electrical and Electronics engineering. I have previously worked as a Summer Intern in the Cloud team of Fidelity Investments. I contribute to Open Source organizations involving Software Development. My recent course project involved exploring Deep Learning techniques to recover variable names from minified javascript files. I was intrigued by applications of Deep Learning and AI. I look forward to exploring it.
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Jiaping (JP)
Jiaping (JP) received a Bachelor degree of Statistics at UC Davis in Spring 2015, where he also continued his graduate studies both in Statistics and Computer Science. His research interests are statistical machine learning, deep learning, NLP and dialog systems. Currently, he's working with Dr. Zhou Yu on a task-oriented multimodal learning project. He interned at Salesforce, San Francisco as a Data Scientist Intern in Summer 2017. He also won the first place in the SoCal Data Open competition hosted by Citadel and Correlation One in November 2017.
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Kevin
I earned my Computer Science B.S and Computer Engineering B.S at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the University of California, Davis I am currently working with Professor Yu Zhou for a Ph.D. in NLP and dialogue systems. My work in dialogue systems has led me to create a movie recommendation dialogue bot using collaborative filtering and matrix factorization.
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MingyanG
Previously, I worked with Professor Jason Corso on video activity segmentation and video classification research problem where I have experience using sparse coding, CNN and RNN. I also did a humor classification project with Professor Rada Mihalcea to classify whether an image can pair with a humorous punchline to make good memes. Currently, I am working with Professor Zhou Yu at UC Davis for my Ph.D, where I work on the research problems of multimodality machine translation research. I implemented a sequence to sequence model and a visual semantic meaning embedding algorithm as the starting baseline model for this research.
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Sam
I am a 3rd year undergraduate in computer science at University of California, Davis. I have a solid foundation in software programming obtained from extracurricular projects and from my undergraduate courses. Later I joined the Natural Language Processing lab at UC Davis and started doing machine translation research with graduate students. In the future, I will go to graduate school and continue studying more advanced NLP techniques because this is what I am interested in.
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Shreenath
I'm a first year Master's student at UC Davis with my areas of research being Software Engineering, Distributed Operating Systems and Machine Learning. I received my Bachelor's in Computer Science in 2015 from the University of Pune and I've worked with Fidelity National Information Services for two years as a Product Development Engineer. I have primarily worked on Python, Django, and Buildbots in a Continuous Integration environment to facilitate the build and release process. I have worked with recommendation systems and language processing before and I look forward to using my experience and building on it through this project.
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Yi Mang (Terry)
I am an undergraduate Computer Science major interested in artificial intelligence. Conversational artificial intelligence enables a natural and engaging way for people to interact with machines. It is an exciting time, but creating a smart socialbot presents many challenges. For our team, I bring my experience in building full-stack software systems that integrate machine learning models. I also have research experience in applying deep learning to computer vision problems.
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Weiming
I used to do research about data stream mining in UESTC. I designed a system analyzing trajectories of taxies in Beijing for graduation. Now, I am working with Professor Zhou Yu for my masters degree. I have done a project for multimedia rumor verification using natural language processing methods. My current work in this team is about designing our knowledge graph and scraping the internet to get raw data of opinions about different hot topics.
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SONIa
I am an undergraduate student majoring in Managerial Economics with plans to double minor in Communications and Technology Management. I currently work as Team Gunrock's Chief Marketing Officer, which allows me to share information of our team's progress with all of you.
I am also currently the Director of Marketing for a business professional club on campus called the Economics and Business Student Association (EBSA). In my spare time I enjoy hiking, biking, spending time with family, and networking. |
SAM
Sam Davidson is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at UC Davis, focusing on computational language modeling and natural language processing. Specifically, he is working on projects involving grammatical error correction in Spanish, dependency parsing of ASR output, and paraphrase generation.
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MICHELLE
GRACE
Grace Wolff graduated in 2016 from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Communication Studies and a certificate in Product Design and Development. Her research interests include representations in video games and its effects on in-group communication and behavior. She assisted with evaluations of the naturalness of Gunrock conversational templates.
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