Jason D. Williams
jdw [at} alumni (dot] princeton [dot) edu
Experience & education
Apple/Siri, Director, Language understanding, 2018-Present
Microsoft Research, Principal Research Manager, 2012-2018
AT&T Labs Research, Principal Member of Technical Staff, 2006-2012
Cambridge University, Ph D, Engineering Dept, 2002-2006
Edify Corp, Senior consultant - Usability and Speech Technology, 2002-2005
Tellme Networks, Voice Application Development Manager, 2000-2001
McKinsey & Company, Associate, 1999-2000
Cambridge University, Masters, Speech/Language Processing, 1998-1999
Princeton University, BSE, Electrical Engineering, 1994-1998
Publications
Recent awards
Appointments, editor, and organizer roles
AAAI Workshop on statistical and empirical methods in spoken dialogue systems, organizer, 2006.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Industry track co-chair, 2023.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Senior area chair, Dialogue and Interactive Systems, 2020, 2021.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Area chair, Dialogue and Interactive Systems, 2018.
AVIxD / IxDA Workshop: Designing for multi-modal interaction, Co-chair, organizing committee, 2012.
Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD), Board of directors, Treasurer, 2010-2012.
ICAPS Workshop: POMDP Practitioners Workshop: solving real-world POMDP problems, Organizing committee, 2010.
IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Co-general chair, 2015.
IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Technical Chair (Dialog area), 2013.
IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Organizing committee, publicity chair, 2011.
Deep RL meets structured prediction, workshop at ICLR, 2019.
Dialogue and Discourse: Special Issue on Dialogue State Tracking, Co-lead guest editor, 2015.
Dialog State Tracking Challenge / Dialog System Techology Challenge (DSTC): Organizer DSTC1-DSTC5; Steering committee DSTC6
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): Senior Area Chair, Dialog and Interactive Systems, 2022.
European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL): Area chair, Dialog and Interactive Systems, 2021.
NAACL, Area chair, Dialogue and Interactive Systems, 2015, 2021.
NAACL-HLT Demonstration program co-chair, 2007.
NeurIPS/NIP workshop on Conversational AI - today's practice and tomorrow's potential: 2019, 2018, 2017
Real Dialog Data Challenge, Advisory board, 2013-2014.
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing: Special Issue on Advances in Spoken Dialogue Systems and Mobile Interface (vol 6, issue 8), Co-lead guest editor, 2012.
SIGDIAL - Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, President emeritus, 2019-present.
SIGDIAL - Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, President 2017-2019.
SIGDIAL - Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Vice-President, 2013-2017.
SIGDIAL Conference, Program committee Co-chair, 2013.
SIGDIAL Conference, Organizing committee, sponsorship chair, 2012 and 2011.
SIGDIAL Conference, mentoring program coordinator, 2010.
SIGDIAL - Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Science Advisory Committee, 2007-2012.
IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (OJSP), Associate Editor, 2019-present.
IEEE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (SLT), Advisory Board, 2016.
IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies (SLT), Organizing committee, co-finance chair, 2012.
IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC), Elected member, 2015-2020; 2009-2011.
IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC), Associate member, 2021-
IEEE SLTC Newsletter, Editor-in-chief, 2009-2011.
Spoken Dialogue Challenge, Organizing Committee: 2010-2012.
Young researchers' roundtable on spoken dialogue systems, organizer, 2005.
Journal reviewing and grant panelist
Transactions of the ACL (TACL) reviewer: 2016, 2017, 2018.
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing reviewer: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007.
Computer Speech and Language reviewer: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.
Computational Linguistics reviewer: 2009.
Speech Communication reviewer: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2008.
Journal of Natural Language Engineering reviewer: 2008.
ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing: 2012, 2011, 2010.
Pattern Recognition Letters reviewer: 2010.
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine reviewer: 2007.
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part B: Cybernetics reviewer: 2012.
Service on 6 grant review panels, for US and international funding agencies.
Conference program committees
AAAI program committee: 2018.
ACL program committee: 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.
EMNLP program committee: 2020, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2009, 2008, 2006
EUSIPCO reviewer: 2015.
ICASSP reviewer: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.
IJCAI senior program committee: 2015.
IJCNLP program committee: 2017.
INTERSPEECH Scientific Review Committee: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.
LREC scientific committee: 2018.
NAACL industry track reviewer: 2018
SIGDIAL program committee: 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.
SIGIR program committee: 2018.
Workshop and other program committees
ACL demo committee: 2011.
ACL Student Research workshop program committee: 2014, 2015.
COLING Workshop: Spoken language technologies for pervasive speech-based and multimodal applications program committee: 2014, 2008
Workshop on Speech-centric Natural Language Processing, program committee: 2017 (EMNLP), 2016 (COLING)
DSTC workshop, reviewer: 2017.
Domain Adaptation for Dialog Agents Workshop (DADA): 2016
EACL 2014 Workshop on Dialog in Motion: 2014.
ECAI/IJCAI/AAAI Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems (MLIS): 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012
EMNLP Workshop on Modeling Large Scale Social Interaction in Massively Open Online Courses: 2014.
Future and Emerging Trends in Language Technologies (FELT): 2015, 2016.
ICLR Deep Reinforcement Learning Meets Structured Prediction: 2019.
ICML Workshop on Learning to Generate Natural Language: 2017.
IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems program committee: 2011, 2009.
Machine Learning for Spoken Language Understanding and Interactions Workshop (at NIPS): 2015.
NAACL Student Research workshop program committee: 2015.
NIPS Workshop on Learning Semantics: 2014.
NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge: 2017.
RE-WOCHAT (Workshop on Collecting and Generating Resources for Chatbots and Conversational Agents - Development and Evaluation): 2016 (1), 2016 (2)
SIGDIAL Special Session on Safety for Conversational AI proposal, Advisory board: 2021.
SLAM: Joint ISCA/IEEE International Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia: 2013.
Workshop on Future and Emerging Trends in Language Technology: 2015.
Workshop on Future directions and needs in the Spoken Dialog Community: Tools and Data scientific committee: 2012.
Workshop on Speech-Centric Natural Language Processing: 2017
Young researchers' roundtable on spoken dialogue systems advisory board: 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2006.
Interns
Kavosh Asadi, Summer 2016 and 2017. Reinforcement learning with recurrent neural networks for dialog systems. Currently at Amazon.
Hao Fang, Summer 2015. Natural language understanding. Currently at Microsoft in the Semantic Machines group.
Nobal Niraula, Summer 2014. Natural language understanding. Currently with Boeing Research & Technology.
Pradeep Dasigi, Summer 2014. Conversational systems. Currently at AI2.
Ke Zhai, Summer 2013. Dialog modeling. Currently an Applied Scientist at Microsoft.
He He, Summer 2013. Action selection in dialog systems (co-mentored with Lihong Li as lead mentor). Currently a Assistant Professor at NYU.
Angeliki Metallinou, Summer 2012. Belief tracking in dialog systems (co-mentored with Dan Bohus). Currently a Speech Scientist at Amazon.
Ethan Selfridge, Summer 2010 and 2011 at AT&T. Turn-taking in dialog systems. Currently Director at LivePerson.
Hamid Chinaei, Summer 2010 at AT&T. Reinforcement learning for dialog systems. Currently at Carleton University.
John Asmuth, Summer 2009 at AT&T. Bayesian approaches to reinforcement learning. Currently at Two Sigma.
Lihong Li, Summer 2008 at AT&T. Feature selection in reinforcement learning. Currently a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon.
Umar Syed, Summer 2007 at AT&T. Learning user models from unlabeled data. Currently a research scientist at Google.
Thesis committees
Ethan Selfridge, Oregon Health & Science University (2013)
Rohit Kumar, Carnegie Mellon University (2011).