Speakers

Chris Dyer is a research scientist at Google DeepMind and an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His work has occasionally been nominated for best paper awards in prestigious NLP venues and has, much more occasionally, won them. He lives in London and, in his spare time, plays cello.

Kevin Knight (USC/ISI)

Quoc V. Le is a research scientist at Google Brain. At Google Brain, Quoc works on large scale deep learning and its applications to object recognition, speech recognition and language understanding. Quoc obtained his PhD at Stanford, undergraduate degree with First Class Honours and Distinguished Scholar at the Australian National University. He was a researcher at National ICT Australia, Microsoft Research and Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics. Quoc won several best paper awards at international conferences on machine learning. In 2014, he was named one of the innovators under 35 by the MIT Tech Review.

Alexander Rush (Harvard)

Kevin Knight is Dean's Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Director of Natural Language Technologies at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. He has taught computer science at USC for more than twenty years, authored over eighty research papers on natural language processing, and received several best paper awards. He is best known for his contributions to statistical machine translation, natural language generation, automata theory, and decipherment of historical manuscripts. Prof. Knight also co-authored the widely adopted textbook Artificial Intelligence (1991). He served as General Chair for the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2005, and General Chair for the North American ACL conference in 2016. In 2011, he served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Prof. Knight is a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, and ISI.

Quoc Le (Google Brain)

Alexander "Sasha" Rush is an Assistant Professor at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences where he runs the HarvardNLP group. Alexander received his PhD from MIT (2014) under the guidance of Michael Collins and worked as a postdoc at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) under Yann LeCun. He is interested in machine learning and deep learning methods for large-scale natural language processing and understanding, including applications in neural machine translation, abstractive summarization, image-to-text prediction, and long-form generation. His past work introduced novel combinatorial methods for structured prediction with applications to syntactic parsing and machine translation. His work has received three best paper/honorable mention awards at major NLP conferences. His group web page is http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/, and he tweets at http://twitter.com/harvardnlp.