Panel Session

Dr. Min Zhang is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Computer Science & Technology (DCST), Tsinghua University, and is the vice director of the AI lab, DCST. She specializes in Web search, personalized recommendation, and user modeling. Currently she serves as the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transaction on Information Systems (TOIS), and ACM SIGIR Executive Committee member, and PC chair or Area Chairs of top conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM, theWebConf, etc. She was awarded IBM Global Faculty Award in 2020. She also owns 12 patents and cooperates with many international and domestic enterprises.

Lina Yao is an Associate Professor with School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. Her research interest lies in machine learning, and its applications in recommender systems, activity recognition, Internet of Things, and Brain Computer Interface. She is serving as the Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (ACM TOSN) and Knowledge-based Systems (KNOSYS).

Kevin Knight is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing at Didi Chuxing.  He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.  Prof. Knight’s research interests include machine translation, dialog processing, natural language generation, automata theory, and decipherment of historical manuscripts.  He taught computer science at USC for 25 years and has authored over 150 NLP research papers.  Prof. Knight also co-wrote the widely-adopted textbook “Artificial Intelligence” (McGraw-Hill).  In 2001, he co-founded the machine translation company Language Weaver, Inc.  Dr. Knight served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for ACL conferences in 2005 and 2016, and as Program Chair in 2001 and 2020.  He is a Fellow of the ACL and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Dr. Bowen Zhou is a Senior Vice President of JD Group (JD.Com), President of Foundational Technologies of JD Tech & Director of JD AI Research. He has also held a number of top technology executive positions at JD Group including the Chair of JD Technology Committee and President of JD Cloud & AI. Dr. Zhou has decades of experience in natural language technology, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Prior to joining JD.com in 2017, Dr. Zhou held several key leadership positions during his 15-year tenure at IBM Research’s headquarters. He most recently served as Director of the AI Foundations Lab at IBM Research in New York, Chief Scientist of IBM Watson Group, and a Distinguished Engineer of IBM. As an IEEE Fellow, Dr. Zhou has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers at top international conferences and journals, with over 11,200 citations, including a few of his pioneering works were cited more than 1500 times each. He previously served as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions, ICASSP Area Chair (2011-2015), ACL, and NAACL Area Chair.

Imed Zitouni is a director of engineering at Google leading R&D efforts on NLU to enhance and enable capabilities for Semantic Search and Answers leveraging the power of the Knowledge Graph. Before joining Google in 2019, Imed was at Microsoft leading the NLU and the Conversation Engine effort for the digital assistant Cortana.  Prior to joining Microsoft in 2012, Imed was a Senior Researcher at IBM Watson for almost a decade, working on several NLP initiatives including the Watson initiative around informatics extraction, language modeling and automatic machine translation. Prior to IBM, Imed was a research member at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, for half a dozen years working on speech recognition, language modeling and spoken dialog systems. Imed received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University-of-Nancy1 and INRIA in France. He also obtained a MEng degree in computer science from ENSI in Tunisia.

Imed is the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resources Language Processing. He is a senior member of IEEE, served as a board member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, and was the associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. He also served as the Information Officer of the ACL SIG on Semitic-Languages and served as chair as well as reviewing-committee-member of several conferences and journals in the area of machine learning, information retrieval and natural language technologies. Imed is the author/co-author of two books, half-dozen book-chapters as well as more than 120 patents and scientific papers.

Michael Witbrock is a Professor at the School of Computer Science, The University of Auckland. He is leading the research group, the Strong AI Lab, at the intersection of machine learning, reasoning and natural language understanding, with an additional focus on achieving the best social and civilisational impacts of increasingly powerful AI.