Pozdrav! Ciao! Salut! Hola! Allinllachu! Welkom! Welcome! Bienvenue! Willkommen! Fàilte! Dobro došli! 

Important: I won't be accepting any new PhD students anytime soon as I left my position at the University of Cambridge.

This is my 'legacy' and outdated academic website as I am now working as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.

About me 

From October 2022 until December 2025 I held a position of Research Professor in the Language Technology Lab at the University of Cambridge (where I started as an early-career postdoc in October 2015) . From November 2022 until my resignation in December 2025, my research was co-funded by a personal Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

I was a Visiting Researcher at Google DeepMind in Zurich from January 2025 until October 2025.

I received the 2021 Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award for contributions to natural language processing and information retrieval.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven (awarded summa cum laude with congratulations of the board of examiners).

I am very interested in  A(G/S)I, natural language processing, machine learning theory and applications, information retrieval, and all that in monolingual, multilingual, and multi-modal (vision-text-speech) settings. This includes (but is not limited to): cross-lingual, multilingual and multi-modal representation learning, modularity and composability of ML models, sample-efficient, parameter-efficient and few-shot ML, transfer learning for enabling responsible cross-lingual NLP applications for low-resource languages and dialects, multi-modal semantics, conversational AI and multilingual dialogue modeling , Integration of external knowledge into ML models, cross-lingual, multilingual and multi-modal information search, few-shot and unsupervised learning for NLP, debiasing and safety for ML and NLP, (multilingual) speech recognition and text-to-speech generation, multilingual resource creation for NLP models, integration of language technology, etc.

Feel free to contact me if your research lies within these or related areas!

In the meantime, also feel free to take a look at my publications.

For reasons beyond my own comprehension, I have created a Twitter account: @licwu

(From January 2018 until November 2024, I was also a Senior/Principal Scientist at PolyAI, an extremely talented company working on cutting-edge Conversational AI technology, but that's another story and this website is mostly my academic dwelling...)