Tutorial 3 Presenter Bios

Muhao Chen

University of Southern California

Muhao Chen is an Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science at USC, where he directs the USC Language Understanding and Knowledge Acquisition (LUKA) Group. His research focuses on data-driven machine learning approaches for natural language understanding and knowledge acquisition. His work has been recognized with an NSF CRII Award, an ACM SIGBio Best Student Paper Award, and a Best Paper Nomination at CoNLL.

Lifu Huang

Virginia Tech

Lifu Huang is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of Virginia Tech. He has a wide range of research interests in NLP, including extracting structured knowledge with limited supervision, NLU and reasoning with external knowledge and commonsense, NLG, representation learning for cross-lingual and cross-domain transfer, and multi-modality learning. He is a recipient of the 2019 AI2 Fellowship and 2021 Amazon Research Award.

Manling Li

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Manling Li is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the Computer Science Department of UIUC. Manling has won the Best Demo Paper Award at ACL’20, the Best Demo Paper Award at NAACL’21, C.L. Dave and Jane W.S. Liu Award, and has been selected as Mavis Future Faculty Fellow. She is a recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship.

Ben Zhou

University of Pennsylvania

Ben Zhou is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer and Information Science, UPenn. Ben’s research interests are distant supervision extraction and experiential knowledge reasoning. He is a recipient of the ENIAC fellowship from the UPenn, and a finalist of the CRA outstanding undergraduate researcher award.

Heng Ji

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign & Alexa AI

Heng Ji is a Professor at the CS Department of UIUC, and an Amazon Scholar. Her research interests focus on NLP, especially on Multimedia Multilingual IE, Knowledge Base Population and Knowledge-driven Generation. She has received “AI’s 10 to Watch” Award, NSF CAREER, Google Research Award, IBM Watson Faculty Award, Bosch Research Award, and Amazon AWS Award, ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award, and NAACL2021 Best Demo Award.

Dan Roth

University of Pennsylvania & AWS AI Labs

Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor at the Department of CIS, UPenn, the NLP Lead at AWS AI, and a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and ACL. In 2017 Roth received the John McCarthy Award. Roth has published broadly in ML, NLP, KRR, and learning theory, and has given keynote talks and tutorials in all ACL and AAAI major conferences. Roth was the Editor-in-Chief of JAIR until 2017, and the program chair of AAAI’11, ACL’03 and CoNLL’02.