NLPCC 2018 Keynote Speakers

Abstract: As the maturing of NLP technology we are running into the era of massive NLP applications. First of all, we like to let machines understand our commands in natural language, like automatically driving, all kinds of assistants (Siri, Alexa, call center, etc.). Second, we are developing machines to do traditional works of study (reading/ understanding/ summarization/ next actions suggestion) to enhance throughout capacities and avoiding subjective error, these capacities are becoming more and more important in fields of financial investment (reports) analytics and risk control.

◆ Hu Yunhua, A Bit AI Technology Co., Ltd.

Topic: ROBOTA: An Interactive Dialog System for e-Commerce

Date and Time: Aug. 30, 2018; 11:45-12:00

Meeting Room: International Banquet Hall (国宴厅)

Short Bio: Hu Yunhua, Founder & CEO of ABitAI Tech, Ph.D. from Xi'an Jiaotong University, former postdoctoral researcher and associate researcher of Microsoft Microsoft Research Lab - Asia, senior algorithm expert of Alibaba Group's. Founded Beijing AbitAI Technology Co., Ltd. in 2016, which is focused on developing artificial intelligence(AI) technology and human-computer interactive system for corporate customers. The products of intelligent interactive recommendation system - Robota and chat-bots are currently used in online shopping and intelligent customer service system to enhance shopping experience.

Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology has shown great potential in e-Commerce, including question answering and dialog. This talk will introduce ROBOTA, an interactive dialog system developed in AbitAI Tech. The goal of ROBOTA is helping corporate clients to build a deep connection with customers in a cost effective manner. By integrating the knowledge graph of a certain vertical domain, the natural language understanding(NLU), and personalized recommendation techniques, ROBOTA has achieved high customer recruiting and has improved the repeated purchase rates. The talk will also share the experience of constructing a leading B2B e-Commerce customer service platform.

◆ Hui Lin, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Shanghai Liulishuo Information Technology Co., Ltd.

Topic: Natural Language Processing for Human Learning: Challenges and Opportunities

Date and Time: Aug. 30, 2018; 12:00-12:15

Meeting Room: International Banquet Hall (国宴厅)

Short Bio: Hui Lin received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. from University of Washington. He is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Liulishuo. Before founding Liulishuo, he was a research scientist at Google headquarter. His research area includes speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and big data mining. He has published over 30 papers in leading journals and conferences, and has been actively involved in various technical committees including ICML, NIPS, AISTATS, ACL, EMNLP, IEEE Signal Precessing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. He holds multiple patents in the U.S. and China. He invented a document summarization method based on submodular optimization, which has now become one of the state-of-art methods for document summarization. During his time at Google, he worked on core speech recognition techniques, where he developed and launched multilingual speech recognition system for Android and an automatic voicemail transcription system based on deep neural network models for Google Voice.

Abstract: Compared to machine learning, human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved. Although human is a remarkable learning machine, the need for efficient learning is growing as the world is rapidly evolving around us. How to leverage machine learning to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of human learning has received much attention recently. In this talk, I will first introduce some areas where machine learning, especially natural language processing technology, can play an important role to make learning more personalized and more efficient. I will then share some recent efforts we made to address the challenges arise in these areas, and conclude with a discussion on opportunities ahead.

◆ Junlan Feng, Chief Scientist, China Mobile Research, China Mobile Online Services Company Limited

Topic: AI Efficiency

Date and Time: Aug. 29, 2018; after 19:00

Meeting Room: International Banquet Hall (国宴厅)

Short Bio: Junlan Feng, Chief Scientist at China Mobile Research and China National 1000 –Talent-Plan Expert. Dr. Feng leads R&D of China Mobile on artificial intelligence and intelligent operation since September 2013. She had been the architect of IBM Big Data from January 2013.1 to August 2013 and a principal researcher at AT&T Labs Research from August 2001 to January 2013. Dr. Feng received her Ph.D. on Speech Recognition in 2001 from Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is an IEEE senior member, an IEEE speech and language committee member and IEEE industry committee member. She is a reviewer for major data mining, speech, and natural language international conferences and journals. She has chaired and organized multiple conferences in these fields. Dr. Feng has over 50 professional publications and has been granted 35 U.S and international patents.

Abstract: What is the bottleneck to build and operate a commercial AI application in non-internet industries? Researchers and practitioners nowadays are constantly improving AI algorithms and creating new theories towards Generic AI (GAI). However it is broadly agreed that we are still far from there. In daily business, there are so many real problems crying for AI technologies to help. Unfortunately, we are relatively slow to collect the right data, fully understand the business problem, train a model, test a model, deploy and operate. This lengthy process is not only costly, and also often fails to meet real-business requirements. In this talk, we will discuss our thoughts and trials to tackle this problem for customer care, marketing and network operation.

◆ Dr. Libin Shen, Founder & CEO, Shanghai Leyan Informantion Technology co., Ltd.

Topic: Cognitive Intelligence to Build the New Era of Enterprise Computing

Date and Time: Aug. 29, 2018; after 19:00

Meeting Room: International Banquet Hall (国宴厅)

Short Bio: Dr. Libin Shen is founder & CEO of Leyan Technologies, a leading provider of cognitive technologies. Dr. Shen received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. After that he served various research and engineering roles at BBN, Akamai, IBM etc. He has rich experience in transferring cutting edge AI technologies to products. Dr. Shen received Best Paper Award at ACL 2008, and won first place at DARPA Machine Translation evaluations from 2007 to 2010. He also served on NSF grant panels and program committees of top academic journals and conferences.

Abstract: Enterprise computing has long been an undervalued market in China for various reasons. Recently, the surge of SaaS and AI technologies dramatically changed the map of enterprising computing, and opened the door to a booming market. Especially, the use of cognitive technologies can bring significant advantages to its early adopters. In this talk, we will survey promising approaches to successful use of the cognitive technologies in various enterprise scenarios. We will further illustrate the key technologies to lead this surge, as well as our effort to make them meet the commercial needs based on our frontline experience.

◆ AISpeech & NLPCC Academy Reception (思必驰学术交流沙龙)

Date and Time: 2018-08-28 18:00-21:00

Meeting Room: Building No. 1, Four Season Hall (新城宾馆1号楼四季厅)

Introduction:AISpeech—Artificial Intelligent Speech is a leading speech technology provider in China, focusing on spoken dialogue system technology. In association with the CCF TCCI, AISpeech will host the Academy Reception on August 28th night, AISpeech Chief Scientist & Co-founder professor Yu Kai, AISpeech Beijing Research Center president Dr ChuMin will attend the reception, inviting experts and scholars from Well-known colleges and universities, showing the most advanced commercial applications of AI speech technology, discussing more possibilities to Social progress that AI technology brings to us, devoting to promote academic progress and technical innovation.
思必驰是国内领先的人工智能语音交互技术平台公司。8月28日，思必驰将联合NLPCC主办方CCF TCCI（中国计算机学会，中文信息技术专委）举办“AISpeech Night学术交流沙龙”，思必驰首席科学家/联合创始人俞凯教授、思必驰北京研发院院长初敏博士将出席沙龙，并力邀众多来自国内知名高校、科研机构的专家学者、青年学子，思必驰将展示人工智能语音技术的最前沿商业化应用，和与会学者共同探讨AI语音技术为社会进步带来的更多可能，推动该领域的学术进步和技术创新。

◆ Lenovo AI Night Cocktail Party

Date and Time: 2018-08-28 17:00-19:00

Meeting Room: Yingze Hall，2F，Yingbin Building（迎宾楼2层迎泽厅）

Introduction:See Lenovo Research AI Lab and meet with many distinguished NLP researchers and scientists.