I am a lab head, PI, and senior scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), Singapore.


My research interests are in conversational AI and language intelligence, ranging from dialogue modeling, spoken language processing, summarization, and natural language generation, with targeted applications in education, healthcare and defense. Speech evaluation technology developed by my team has been deployed at the Ministry of Education, Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic to help support home based learning and promote mother tongue education (more details).


I'm currently a program co-chair for ICLR 2023, associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and Computer Speech and Language, and senior editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters.


I received my PhD from MIT and Harvard. During my PhD, I worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on multilingual speech processing.


News, Media, and Talks

  • Program co-Chair for ICLR 2023

  • Controllable Neural Language Generation, Plenary Talk at annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, Aug 2022 (talk link, workshop link)

  • Data Science Education: The Signal Processing Perspective (Panel Discussion), ICASSP, Singapore, May 24 2022

  • Senior Area Chair, AACL 2022

  • EVA (Education via AI): Theoretical and Practical Considerations for Technology Deployment, AI Seminar Series, SEAB (Singapore Examination and Assessment Board), Apr 20 2022

  • Virtual Language Coaches Powered by Artificial Intelligence, GAIA STEM Lecture Series, Natioanl Central University, Taiwan, Feb 19 2022

  • Area Chair for ACL 2021, EMNLP 2021

  • Fast Prototyping a Dialogue Comprehension System, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA, Mar 29 2021

  • Keynote speech at AI Singapore - Ministry of Education workshop on AI for Mother Tongue Language Learning - Dec 2021

  • Understanding Clinical Conversations, Abridge AI Inc., (CMU spin-off), Pennsylvania, USA, Sep 2 2020

  • Singapore 100 Women in Tech 2021 [honor list and citation] [weblink] - Oct 2021

  • Election to ISCA Board [news link] - Sep 2021

  • Best Paper Award at SIGDIAL 2021

  • Young Scientist Award at MICCAI 2021

  • Interview by Tamil Murasu on 20 September 2020 [news link] [English translation]

  • P&G Connect + Develop Open Innovation Award 2020

  • Moderator, Low Resource NLP Panel, SSNLP - Dec 2020

  • Thanks L’Oréal and UNESCO! L’Oréal Singapore For Women in Science National Fellowship 2019 [award announcement] [more info]

  • Invited Speaker, Lifelong Learning for Spoken Language Systems Workshop, IEEE ASRU - Dec 2019

  • Invited Speaker, Conversational AI: Data Augmentation, Dialogue Comprehension, Summary Generation, IPAL Singapore France Workshop - Dec 2019

  • Invited Speaker, Conversational AI: From Knowledge Representation to Spoken Dialogue Comprehension and Summarization, UBTech AI Forum - Nov 2019

  • Invited Speaker, Acoustic Signal Processing, Automatic Speech Recognition, and Machine Translation for Emotion Recognition and Analysis, Digital Emotions Seminar at A*STAR & ADSC - Mar 2019

  • Spoken Dialogue Comprehension and Summarization, National University of Singapore, Oct 2 2019

  • Seminar on Spoken Language Processing: Automatic Speech Recognition and Beyond, Singapore University of Technology and Design - Mar 2017

  • Low Resource Spoken Keyword Search, MIT Lincoln Lab, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Sep 15 2016

  • Seminar on "Low Resource Spoken Keywoard Search" at JHU CSLP on 20 Sep 2016 [details]

  • Talk on Low Resource Spoken Keyword Search at IBM on 27 July 2015

  • Featured in Zao Bao (Singapore's Chinese Newspaper) on International Women’s Day on 8 March 2015

  • IEEE Signal Processing Singapore Chapter, Workshop on Natural Language Processing, Open Keyword Search for Low-Resource Spoken Languages - 16 December 2014

  • Seminar on Strategies for Spoken Keyword Search in Vietnamese, Academia Sinica, Taiwan on 10 Jan 2014

  • Seminar on Informative Dialect Recognition, National University of Singapore, 23 Aug 2012

  • Invited Talk, Consonant landmarks: automatic detection and interpretation, Ken Stevens Retirement: Quantal Transition, Acoustic Society of America, Miami, Florida, USA, Nov 2008

  • Seminar on Automatically Characterizing English Dialects using Phonological Rules, MGH Voice Research Forum, Boston, MA, USA, 31 Oct 2008