Speakers

Aaron Courville is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal. He has a PhD from the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.Courville was an early contributor to deep learning: he is a founding member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, a fellow in CIFAR’s Learning in Machines & Brains program and, with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio, co-wrote the seminal textbook on deep learning.His current research focuses on the development of deep learning models and methods. He is particularly interested in reinforcement learning, deep generative models and multimodal ML, as well as their applications, such as computer vision and natural language processing.Courville holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Canada Research Chair in Learning Representations that Generalize Systematically. His research has been supported by Microsoft Research, Samsung, Hitachi, Sony and Google (Focused Research Award).

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Dr. Mona Diab is a computer science professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. Previously, she was a professor at George Washington University and a research scientist with Facebook AI. Before joining Meta, she led the Lex Conversational AI project within Amazon AWS AI. Her current focus is on Responsible AI and how to operationalize it for NLP technologies. Her interests span building robust technologies for low resource scenarios with a special interest in Arabic technologies, (mis) information propagation, computational socio-pragmatics, computational psycholinguistics, NLG evaluation metrics, Language modeling and resource creation. Mona has served the community in several capacities: Elected President of SIGLEX and SIGSemitic, and she currently serves as the elected VP for ACL SIGDAT, the board supporting EMNLP conferences. She has delivered tutorials and organized numerous workshops and panels around Arabic processing, Responsible NLP, Code Switching, etc. She is a cofounder of CADIM (Consortium on Arabic Dialect Modeling, previously known as Columbia University Arabic Dialects Modeling Group), in 2005, which served as a world renowned reference point on Arabic Language Technologies. Moreover she helped establish two research trends in NLP, namely computational approaches to Code Switching and Semantic Textual Similarity. She is also a founding member of the *SEM conference, one of the top tier conferences in NLP. Mona has published more than 250 peer reviewed articles.

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Anna Korhonen is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), where she directs the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) and co-directs the Language Technology Laboratory (LTL). Previously, she was a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society, and a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Before her current position, she worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo and the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and holds master’s degrees in both Computer Science and Linguistics.

Professor Korhonen’s research focuses on human-centric AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), drawing on human cognitive, social, and creative intelligence. Her work aims to promote social and global good, including efforts to make language technologies more geographically and socially inclusive and to apply AI techniques to address problems in health, the environment, and scientific research. She has led numerous large projects, served as a Programme Chair for leading NLP conferences, and acted as an action editor for top journals such as Computational Linguistics, Transactions of ACL, and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

She has also been the president of SIGLEX and a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Executive Board. Additionally, she is a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College in Cambridge and a Fellow of the ACL, the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA).

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Dr. Huan Liu is a Regents Professor and Ira A. Fulton Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Southern California and B.Eng. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Shanghai JiaoTong University. Before he joined ASU, he worked at Telecom Australia Research Labs and was on the faculty at National University of Singapore. At Arizona State University, he was recognized for excellence in teaching and research in Computer Science and Engineering and received the 2014 President's Award for Innovation. He is the recipient of the ACM SIGKDD 2022 Innovation Award. His research interests are in data mining, machine learning, feature selection, social computing, social media mining, and artificial intelligence, investigating interdisciplinary problems that arise in many real-world, data-intensive applications with high-dimensional data of disparate forms such as social media. His well-cited publications include books, book chapters, encyclopedia entries as well as conference and journal papers. He is a co-author of a text, Social Media Mining: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press. He is a founding organizer of the International Conference Series on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction, Editor in Chief of ACM TIST, and Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Big Data and its Specialty Chief Editor of Data Mining and Management. He is a Fellow of ACM, AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE.

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