◇ Short Bio: Yang Liu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. He received his PhD degree from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007. His research focuses on natural language processing and machine translation. He has published over 40 papers on leading NLP/AI journals and conferences such as Computational Linguistics, ACL, AAAI, EMNLP, and COLING. He won the COLING/ACL 2006 Meritorious Asian NLP Paper Award and the Second Prize of Beijing Science and Technology Award. He serves as ACL 2014 Tutorial Co-Chair, ACL 2015 Local Arrangement Co-Chair, SIGHAN Information Officer, and the General Secretary of Computational Linguistics Technical Committee of Chinese Information Processing Society. Homepage: http://nlp.csai.tsinghua.edu.cn/~ly/.

◇ Panel: Career Selection for NLP Students: Academia vs. Industry

◇  Panelists: Ming Zhou, Chengqing Zong, Bing Qin, Yajuan Lyu, Yang Liu, Jun Lang, Chair: Deyi Xiong

◇ ABSTRACT: In this panel, we are going to discuss on the career choice problem for NLP students. The panelists from academic and industrial will discuss several sub-topics such as "differences and similarities of NLP research in academia and industry", "how can NLP students well prepare for their career selection?"，“different views of being interns in a company?” and so on. The panelists will also communicate with audiences in an interactive session.

◇ Ming Zhou: Ming Zhou, Principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, director of Chinese Information Technology Committee of China Computer Federation, executive member of China Chinese Information Processing Society, PhD advisor of multiple universities including Harbin Institute of Technology, Tianjin University, Nankai University and Shandong University. He obtained his Bachler degree from Chongqing University in 1985 and his PhD. at Harbin Institute of Technology in 1991, both in CS. He was a post-doc at Tsinghua during 1991-1993 and then an associate professor until 1999. He led a team to develop Chinese-Japanese machine translation product in Kodensha Ltd. in Japan during 1996-1999. He is the inventor of the first Chinese-English machine translation system (CEMT-1), the famous Chinese-Japanese machine translation product (J-Beijing). He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 1999 and soon became the manager of its natural language group. His group has developed many famous NLP technologies including MS IME, MS Couplets, Engkoo/Bing Dictionary, Chinese-English machine translation for MS Translator and Skype Translator. In recent years, his group worked with related product groups and developed popular chatbots such as Xiaoice, Rinna and Tay with totally 40+ million users. He has published 100+ papers at important conferences and journals and has invented 38 international patents.

◇ Chengqing Zong: Chengqing Zong received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in March 1998. He is a professor at the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Automation. His research interests include machine translation, natural language processing, and sentiment classification. He is a member of International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL). He is associate editor of ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP) and editorial board member of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Machine Translation, and Journal of Computer Science and Technology. Also, he served ACL-IJCNLP 2015 as a PC co-chair, COLING 2010 as an organization committee co-chair, and many other top-tier international conferences, such as AAAI, IJCAI, WWW and CIKM etc., as Senior PC member, PC member or other roles. He will be area chair of IJCAI’2017 and general chair of IJCNLP’2017. In addition, he has won many awards, including the Chinese National Science and Technology Progress Award, 2015, Qian Wei-Chang Prize for the Science and Technology of Chinese Information Processing, 2014, and PACLIC’2009 Best Paper Award etc.

◇ Bing Qin: Bing Qin is a professor in Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), a doctoral supervisor and the deputy director of the Research Centre of Social Computing and Information Retrieval in HIT. Professor Bing Qin is the fellow of the Special Societies of both Information Retrieval and Social Media Processing, in Information Retrieval Chinese Information Processing Society of China. Professor Bing Qin's research interests include natural language processing, text mining, sentiment analysis and so on. She has published more than 60 papers in top journals and conferences, including ACL, COLING, EMNLP, IEEE TKDE and IEEE TASLP and has been a visiting professor in University of Toronto in Canada. Professor Bing Qin and her team have taken part in the task of "Twitter Sentiment Analysis" in SemEval 2014, and achieved the second best performance. She has been the area chair of multiple conferences and reviewer of multiple journals and conferences. She has been responsible to multiple National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and 863 projects.Professor Bing Qin also cooperates with multiple Internet companies and multiple technologies in real products. She has won the first prize of WeiChang QIan Chinese Information Processing Scientific and Technological Award, and the second prize of Technological Invention of HeiLongJiang Province Award.

◇ Yajuan Lyu: Yajuan Lyu is a senior researcher at Baidu. She received her PhD degree from Harbin Institute of Technology. She had worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences before she joined Baidu. Her research focuses on natural language processing related topics, including machine translation, document summarization, text generation and so on. She has published over 60 papers at important conferences and journals and had invented over 10 patents. She has been responsible for multiple national projects such as Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), 863 Program and the National Key Technology R&D Program etc. She won the First Prize of China Institute of Electronic Information Science and Technology Award, 2014 and the Second Prize of Beijing Science and Technology Award, 2009. Many of her research outputs have been transformed into Baidu products.

◇ Jun Lang: Jun Lang, Ph.D., Senior Specialist of Alibaba, obtained Ph.D. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology. He had been responsible for the R&D of Language Technology Platform (LTP) of Harbin Institute of Technology. And in Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, he had been worked for four years as research scientist and in charge of the statistical machine translation system R&D. From 2014, he has been Senior Specialist of Search Division of Alibaba, set up the Natural Language Processing team from zero, and in charge of the Natural Language Processing Platform's R&D and business applications. He had published more than 20 research papers on international and domestic journals and conferences. He also applied more than 20 patents. Jun Lang was publication chair of the 9th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2013. He has been awarded as Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2008, First Prize of Weichang Qian -- Chinese Information Processing Science and Technology Award in 2010, the Best New Employee of Algorithm Department of Search Division of Alibaba in 2015, Best Innovation Award of Taobao of Alibaba in 2016, Best Team Collaboration Award of Search Division of Alibaba in 2016.

◇ Deyi Xiong: Deyi Xiong is a professor at Sochoow University. He is also the Excellent Young Scholar supported by National Science Fund of China and the department head in the school of computer science and technology of Soochow University. Previously he was a research scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research of Singapore from 2007-2013. His primary research interests are in the area of natural language processing, cross-lingual information processing, natural language understanding and deep learning. He has published papers in prestigious journals and conferences, including Computational Linguistics, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, AAAI, IJCAI ACL, and EMNLP. He is the first author of the book "Linguistically Motivated Statistical Machine Translation: Models and Algorithms" published by Springer. He was/is the program co-chair of IALP 2012 and CWMT 2017. He has also served as program committee member of many international conferences including ACL, EMNLP, COLING, NAACL and IJCNLP. He was the recipient of Achiever of the Year 2008, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, and Beijing Science and Technology Award 2nd Prize in 2009.