Bios of Tutorial 3 Presenters

Wenhao Yu

Wenhao Yu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research lies in controllable knowledge-driven natural language processing, particularly in natural language generation. His research has been published in top-ranked NLP and data mining conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, WWW, and CIKM. Additional information is available at https://wyu97.github.io/

Meng Jiang

Meng Jiang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He received his B.E. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests focus on knowledge gra construction and natural language generation for news summarization and forum post generation. The awads he received include Notre Dame Faculty Award in 2019 and Best Paper Awards at ISDSA and KDD-DLG in 2020. Additional information is available at http://www.meng-jiang.com/.

Zhiting Hu

Zhiting Hu is an assistant professor in Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest lies in the broad area of natural language processing in particular controllable text generation, machine learning to enable training AI agents from all forms of experiences such as structured knowledge, ML systems and applications. His research was recognized with best demo nomination at ACL 2019 and outstanding paper award at ACL 2016. Additional information is available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhitingh/.

Qingyun Wang

Qingyun Wang is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research lies in controllable knowledge-driven natural language generation, with a recent focus on the scientific paper generation. He served as a program committee in generation track for multiple conferences including ICML 2020, ACL 2019-2020, ICLR 2021, etc. He previously entered the finalist of the first Alexa Prize competition. Additional information is available at https://eaglew.github.io/

Heng Ji

Heng Ji is a professor at Computer Science Department of University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, and Amazon Scholar. She has published on Multimedia Multilingual Information Extraction and Knowledge-enriched NLG including technical paper generation, knowledge base description, and knowledge-aware image and video caption generation. The awards she received include "Young Scientist" by World Economic Forum, "AI’s 10 to Watch" Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems, NSF CAREER award, and ACL 2020 Best Demo Award. She has served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018, and she is NAACL secretary 2020-2021. Additional information is available at https://blender.cs.illinois.edu/hengji.html.

Nazneen Rajani

Nazneen Rajani is a senior research scientist at Salesforce Research. She got her PhD in Computer Science from UT Austin in 2018. Several of her work has been published in ACL, EMNLP NACCL, and IJCAI including work on generating explanations for commonsense and physical reasoning. Nazneen was one of the finalists for the VentureBeat Transform 2020 women in AI Research. Her work has been covered by several media outlets including Quanta Magazine, Venture- Beat, SiliconAngle, ZDNet. More information on https://www.nazneenrajani.com