I am a researcher and the manager of the Natural Language Group at Adobe Research. I develop machine learning algorithms for Adobe digital media and digital marketing products. I am interested in applying AI techniques to intelligent applications such as search & recommendation, personal assistant agents, intelligent tutoring, spoken dialogue systems, multimodal interfaces, conversational video games, and AI for healthcare. My work on dialog won the Best Paper Award at SIGDIAL 2018, and I was the winner of the 4th Dialog State Tracking Challenge in 2016. My work on AI for healthcare won the 2nd ACM SIGAI Industry Award as one of three Team Leads (presented at IJCAI 2021; NVIDIA acquired the startup in December 2024). 

I joined Adobe Research in 2012. Before that, I was at North Side Inc. in Montreal, where I led the language team to develop dialog management technologies for the Bot Colony game (~23 million USD investment). I conducted my Ph.D. research at the Human Media Interaction Group, University of Twente, the Netherlands. I worked as an engineering research associate at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. I began my research career as a research assistant at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 2004, I have published over 100 peer-reviewed papers at top AI conferences and hold more than 50 patents, as well as over 60 pending ones. 

Area chair: ACL 2025 Industry Track, NeurIPS 2025

Program committee member (2019-present): ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, CVPR, ICCV, ICLR.

Journal reviewer: TACL 2021-present, NLE 2021 - present

News:

2025

• Jul 7: 1 paper accepted at COLM

• Jun 25: 1 paper accepted at ICCV (acceptance rate 24% over 11,239 submissions)

• May 23: 2 papers accepted at ACL (SlimLM got accepted to the demo track)

• May 1: 2 papers accepted at ICML (acceptance rate 26.9% over 12,107 submissions)

• Apr 3: Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025

• Feb 26: 1 paper accepted at CVPR (acceptance rate 22.1% over 13,008 submissions)

• Feb 9: Area Chair for ACL'25 Industry

• Jan 22: 1 paper accepted at NAACL.

2024

• Nov 19: Our SlimLM work got into the news: VentureBeat, TechXplore, Emarketer, NotebookCheck, Facebook - AI Ideas and Innovations, Gadgets360, YouTube, X

• Sep 2: 1 paper published at Interspeech

• Apr 10: 1 paper accepted at SIGIR

• Mar 13: 1 paper accepted at NAACL

• Feb 26: 1 paper accepted at CVPR

• Jan 25: A patent from my team appeared in the Daily Upside.

• Jan 18: 1 paper accepted at EACL

• Jan 16: 1 paper accepted at ICLR for oral presentation (1.2% acceptance rate over 7262 submissions) 

2023

• 2 papers accepted at EMNLP

• 3 papers accepted at ICCV

• 1 paper accepted at Interspeech

• 2 papers accepted at ACL

• 2 papers accepted at CVPR (acceptance rate: 2359/9155 = 25.8%)

• 1 paper accepted at EACL (acceptance rate: 281/1166 = 24.1%)

• 1 paper accepted at ICASSP

• Tech lead and primary contributor for Adobe Firefly support text prompts in over 100 languages, currently used in Firefly, Photoshop, Express, and Illustrator. See here.

2022

• 1 paper accepted at AACL-IJNLP (oral, acceptance rate: 63/554 = 11.4%)

• 1 paper accepted at ACCV (oral, acceptance rate: 41/836 = 4.9%)

• 4 papers accepted at COLING (acceptance rate: 634/2026 = 31.3%)

• 1 paper accepted at Interspeech

• 2 papers accepted at NAACL

• 1 paper accepted at ICASSP

• Key contributor for Behance LiveStream Search released in Q2 2022.

• Primary contributor for keyphrase extraction service in Blink Q2 2022

2021

• 1 paper accepted at AAAI 2022

• 2 papers accepted at EMNLP

• 3 papers accepted at ACL

• 1 paper accepted at CVPR

• 1 long paper accepted at NAACL (acceptance rate: 350/1245 = 28.1%)

• Winner of the 2021 ACM SIGAI Industry  Award as Team Lead

• Key primary contributor for the Adobe AEM smart tag intelligence service released in Feb 2021

2020

• 3 papers accepted at EMNLP

• 1 paper accepted at ACL

• 1 paper accepted at CVPR

• 1 paper accepted at COLING

• 1 paper accepted at ICASSP

• Key primary contributor for the cloud-power search suggestions in Acrobat released on May 12, 2020, which serves hundreds of millions of users monthly

2019

• 1 paper accepted at EMNLP

• 1 paper accepted at CIKM

• 1 paper accepted at Interspeech

• 1 paper accepted at ACL (oral, acceptance rate: 660/2905 = 22.7%)

2018

• Invited plenary talk at the 1st Uber Science Symposium, San Francisco, Nov 28, 2018 (details)

• Our paper at MULA-ECCV 2018 won the best paper award.

• Our paper at SIGDIAL 2018 won the best paper award.

• 1 paper accepted at COLING

• 1 paper accepted at Interspeech

• 2 papers accepted at NAACL

• 1 paper accepted at CVPR (acceptance rate: 797/3303 = 29.6%) 

2017

• 1 paper accepted at CVPR (acceptance rate: 783/2680 = 29%)

• Speech Driven Book Technology code is now available on GitHub with Apache 2.0 license: link

• Voice-based photo editing project has received a lot of attractions from the press: YouTube, Forbes, Tech Crunch, and Yahoo. Here is the complete list of coverage.

2016

• Main contributor of the new lifetime value algorithm used in Adobe Target since 2016. Here is the news: Adobe.