Prof. Eduard Hovy, Fellow of ACL, University of Melbourne, Australia and 

Biography: Eduard Hovy is the Executive Director of Melbourne Connect (a research and tech transfer centre at the University of Melbourne), a professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems, and a research professor at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2020–21 he served as Program Manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), where he managed programs in Natural Language Technology and Data Analytics. Dr. Hovy holds adjunct professorships in CMU’s Machine Learning Department and at USC (Los Angeles). Dr. Hovy completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987 and was awarded honorary doctorates from the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid in 2013 and the University of Antwerp in 2015. He is one of the initial 17 Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and is also a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Dr. Hovy’s research focuses on computational semantics of language and addresses various areas in Natural Language Processing and Data Analytics, including in-depth machine reading of text, information extraction, automated text summarization, question answering, the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and ontologies, and machine translation. In early 2022 his Google h-index was 95, with over 54,000 citations. Dr. Hovy is the author or co-editor of eight books and around 400 technical articles and is a popular invited speaker. From 2003 to 2015 he was co-Director of Research for the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence for Command, Control, and Interoperability Data Analytics, a distributed cooperation of 17 universities. In 2001 Dr. Hovy served as President of the international Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), in 2001–03 as President of the International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT), and in 2010–11 as President of the Digital Government Society (DGS). Dr. Hovy regularly co-teaches Ph.D.-level courses and has served on Advisory and Review Boards for both research institutes and funding organizations in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, and the USA.

Assoc. Prof. Shafiq Rayhan Joty, Research Director at Salesforce Research, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore

Biography: Shafiq Joty is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at NTU, where he founded the NTU-NLP group and currently leads the group. He is also a research director at Salesforce Research, where he directs the NLP group. Shafiq's research has primarily focused on developing language analysis tools (e.g., syntactic parsers, language models, NER, discourse parser, coherence models) and downstream NLP applications including machine translation, question answering, text summarization, controllable generation and vision-language tasks. A significant part of his current research focuses on multilingual processing and robustness of NLP models. Shafiq severed (or will serve) as a PC co-chair of SIGDIAL-2023, a senior area chair for ACL’22 and EMNLP’21 in Machine Learning (ML) and NLP Applications tracks respectively, and area chair for ICLR-23, ACL'19-21, EMNLP'19, NAACL’21 and EACL’21 in ML, QA and Discourse tracks. He is an action editor for ACL-RR. He gave tutorials at ACL’19, ICDM’18 and COLING’18 on discourse processing and conversation modeling. His research contributed to 17 patents and more than 110+ papers in top-tier NLP and ML conferences and journals including ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, CL and JAIR. More about him can be found at https://raihanjoty.github.io/

Prof. Thepchai Supnithi, Lab. Director, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center

Biography: Thepchai Supnithi is currently Director of Artificial Intelligence Research Group at National Electronics and Computer Technology Center. His interest includes Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Graph. He serves as an executive committee at Asia Pacific Society of Computer in Education, AACL, IJCNLP. He is currently a vice president of Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand. His main research covers machine translation, text summarization, corpus construction and applied AI in a lot of domains, such as culture, education and medical. He also participates as a committee member in a lot of conferences such as ICCE, IJCNLP, ACL, MT Summit, KICSS, and IJCKG.

Prof. Haizhou Li, IEEE Fellow, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Biography: Haizhou Li received the B.Sc, M.Sc, and Ph.D degrees in electrical and electronic engineering from South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China in 1984, 1987, and 1990 respectively. He is now a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the National University of Singapore.

Professor Li has worked on human language technology in academia and industry since 1988. He has taught in The University of Hong Kong (1988-1989), South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, China (1990-1994), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2006-2016), University of Eastern Finland (2009), and the University of New South Wales (2011-). He was a Visiting Professor at CRIN/INRIA in France (1994-1995). As a technologist, he was a Research Manager in Apple-ISS Research Centre (1996-1998), Research Director of Lernout & Hauspie Asia Pacific (1999-2001), Vice President of InfoTalk Corp. Ltd (2001-2003), Principal Scientist and Department Head of Human Language Technology at the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore (2003-2016), and the Research Director of the Institute for Infocomm Research (2014-2016). He co-founded Baidu-I2R Research Centre in Singapore (2012). Professor Li was known for his technical contributions to several award-winning speech products, such as Apple's Chinese Dictation Kits for Macintosh (1996) and Lernout & Hauspie's Speech-Pen-Keyboard Text Entry Solution for Asian languages (1999). He was the architect of a series of major technology deployments that include TELEFIQS voice-automated call centre service in Singapore Changi International Airport (2001), voiceprint engine for Lenovo A586 Smartphone (2012), and Baidu Music Search (2013).

Professor Li's research interests include speech information processing, natural language processing, and human-robot interaction. He has published over 300 technical papers. Professor Li has served as Associate Editor (2008-2012), Senior Area Editor (2014-2016), and Editor-in-Chief (2015-2017) of IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING. He has also served as Associate Editor of Computer Speech and Language (2012-), and Springer International Journal of Social Robotics (2008-), and a Member of IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2013-2015). Professor Li is the President of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA, 2015-2017), the President of Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA, 2015-2016), the President of the Chinese and Oriental Language Information Processing Society (COLIPS, 2011-2013), the Vice President of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP, 2015-2016). Professor Li served as the General Chair of ACL 2012 and INTERSPEECH 2014, the Local Arrangement Chair of SIGIR 2008 and ACL-IJCNLP 2009, and the Technical Program Chair of ISCSLP 1998, APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2010, IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop 2014, and IEEE ChinaSIP 2015. Professor Li was the recipient of National Infocomm Awards 2002, Institution of Engineers Singapore (IES) Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award 2013 and 2015, President's Technology Award 2013, and MTI Innovation Activist Gold Award 2015 in Singapore. He was named one of the two Nokia Visiting Professors in 2009 by Nokia Foundation. He is a Fellow of IEEE, and Member of ACL, ACM, IEICE and ISCA.

 

Prof. Wong Kam Fai, ACL Fellow, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

Biography: Kam-Fai Wong obtained his PhD from Edinburgh University, Scotland, in 1987. After his PhD, he was researchers in Heriot-Watt University (Scotland), UniSys (Scotland) and ECRC (Germany). At present he is Associate Dean (External Affairs) of the Faculty of Engineering, Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, Director, Centre for Innovation and Technology (CINTEC), and Associate Director, Centre for Entrepreneurship, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as well as Associate Director, Key-Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies (PKU), Ministry of Education, China. Also, he is a co-founder of the first Chinese news search portal, namely Wisers Information Ltd., in 1998. His research interest focuses on Natural Language Processing especially in Chinese and Social Media processing. He has published over 250 peer reviewed papers in these areas. He has published the book "Introduction in Chinese Natural Language Processing" (2009), which is the first of its king written in English. His research work is summarized by the book: "Social Media Content Analysis: NLP and Beyond" which was published in 2018. He is the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Asian Language Processing (TALIP) and the General Chair of AACL2020, BigComp2016, NLPCC2015, IJCNLP2011, AIRS2008 and ICCPOL2006. Also, he was the President of Asia Federation of NLP (AFNLP), 2014-2016.

Prof. Tianrui Li, Southwest Jiaotong University, China

Biography: Dr Tianrui Li is a Professor and the Director of the Key Lab of Cloud Computing and Intelligent Technique of Sichuan Province, Southwest Jiaotong University, China. Since 2000, he has co-edited 6 books, 11 special issues of international journals, received 16 Chinese invention patents and published over 360 research papers (e.g., AI, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TEC, IEEE TFS, IEEE TIFS, IEEE ASLP, IEEE TIE, IEEE TC, IEEE TVT) in refereed journals and conferences (e.g., ACL, IJCAI, KDD, UbiComp, WWW, ICDM, CIKM, EMNLP). 5 papers were ESI Hot Papers and 18 papers was ESI Highly Cited Papers. He serves as the area editor of International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems (SCI), editor of Knowledge-based Systems (SCI) and Information Fusion (SCI), associate editor of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, etc. He is an IRSS Fellow and Steering Committee Chair (2019-2020), IEEE CIS ETTC member (2019-2020), IEEE CIS SMC member (2018-2020), a senior member of ACM and IEEE, ACM SIGKDD member, Chair of IEEE CIS Chengdu Chapter (2013-2018) and Treasurer of ACM SIGKDD China Chapter. Over 80 graduate students (including 9 Post-Docs, 25 Doctors) have been trained. Their employment units include Microsoft Research Asia, Sichuan University, Huawei, JD, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They have received Best Papers/Dissertation Awards 20 times, Champion of Sina Weibo Interaction-prediction at Tianchi Big Data Competition (Bonus 200,000 RMB), Second Place of Social Influence Analysis Contest of IJCAI-2016 Competitions and Second Place of Weather forecast Contest of AI Challenger 2018.

Prof. Dr. Uwe Quasthoff, Universität Leipzig, Germany

As an approach to relation extraction and sentence understanding, so-called typical sentences are used: Sentences of simple syntactic structure repeatedly found with rich lexical variability. The syntactic structures are selected by high frequency, and with large corpora they allow the usage of word similarities to cluster such sentences to basic statements.

Biography: Prof. Uwe Quasthoff works at the Natural Language Processing Group at the Department of Computer Science at Leipzig University in Germany. His main research topics are language independent methods in Natural Language Processing, building very large corpora, and the structure of natural language. The research method is the analysis of large text corpora with statistical and pattern based as well as machine learning methods. The Leipzig Corpora collection (http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/) started in 1995 and now contains pre-processed text collections and monolingual dictionaries in more than 250 languages. The approach is language independent, hence the algorithms for further processing apply usually to a large group of languages. The analysis of word co-occurrence patterns was the starting point for machine learning used for semantic similarities in different granularities.

Prof. Wookey Lee, VOICE AI Research Institute & Biomedical Science and Engineering, Inha University, Korea

Biography: Wookey Lee received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1987 and 1993, and 1996, respectively. He finished his FSE in Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 2000, and got a diploma in TEFL, ISS, Canada, 2003. He is now a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering as well as the Program in Medical Science and Engineering in Inha University, Incheon, South Korea.

Professor Lee is a director of VOICE AI Research Institute, Inha University, and has been the director of Business Industry center, and Information Communication center, and is now an adjunct professor of Research Center for Social Informatics, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan, and research professor of iHub-Anubhuti Execution committee, India, was a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science at the UBC, Canada co-hosted by Prof. Raymond Ng and Prof. Laks Lakshumanan. He has served several international academic societies and conferences such as ACM CIKM, BigComp, Dasfaa, Dexa, Enterprise Architecture, EDB, ICDE, SCM, SocialCom, VLDB, etc. He has been the editor in chief of Information Tech. and Arch. and Journal of Bigdata Services and Applications, and an associate editor for World Wide Web Journal, Supercomputing, Sensors, Distributed Sensor Networks, Cluster Computing, Journal of Big Data, Computers in Industrial Engineering, etc. He was the president of Korea Database Society, and is serving as a Steering Committee member of BigComp, and the IEEE TCDE executive committee members. He got the best paper awards from IEEE TCSC, ACM Bigdas, KORMS, KIISE, KOSIPER, etc. His research areas are Deep Learning, VOICE with Artificial Intelligence, Patent Information Systems, Trajectory Security, and database and graph theory. He has published more than 300 technical papers in internationally refereed journals and conferences including “Effective privacy preserving data publishing by vectorization." Information Sciences (2020), and pertained more than 100 patents including Device for Supplementing Voice and Method for Controlling the Same(US9232297B2).

Assoc. Prof. Phayung Meesad, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Thailand

Biography: Phayung Meesad was graduated in Master of Science and Doctoral of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA in 1998 and 2002, respectively. He is now an Associate Professor and Director of Central Library, KMUTNB Smart Digital Library, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Thailand. His research of interests are Computational Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Analytics, Data Science, Data Mining, Digital Signal Processing, Image Processing, Business Intelligence, Time Serires Analysis, Natural Language Processing.