Faculty and Ph.D. Students
Joyce Y. Chai
Professor
Chimaobi Okite
Ph.D. Student (Co-advised with Rada Mihalcea)
Natural language Reasoning, Natural language Generation, Large Language Models
Jacob Sansom
Ph.D. Student (Co-advised with Honglak Lee), NSF GRFP Fellow
Language Acquisition, Continual Learning, Cognitive Modeling
Josue Torres-Fonseca
Ph.D. Student, NSF GRFP Fellow
Embodied Agents, Spoken Language Understanding, Situated Dialogue, Language Grounding, Cognitive development
Yinpei Dai
Ph.D. Candidate
Spoken Language Understanding, Dialogue Management, Natural Language Generation
Ziqiao "Martin" Ma
Ph.D. Candidate
Multimodality, Agentic Interaction, Space and Embodiment, Psycholinguistics
Alumni
Ph.D. Alumni:
- Jianing Jed Yang (Ph.D. 2025 –> Figure AI)
- Keunwoo Peter Yu (Ph.D. 2025 –> Wayve)
- Yuwei Bao (Ph.D. 2025 –> Microsoft Research)
- Yichi Zhang (Ph.D. 2025 –> Research Scientist, ByteDance Seed)
- Shane Storks (Ph.D. 2024 –> Postdoc Fellow, Weinberg Institute of Cognitive Science @ UMich)
- Shengyi Qian (Ph.D. 2024 –> Research Scientist, Meta FAIR)
Full list
- Guangyue Xu (Ph.D. 2024 –> Senior Data Scientist, Search@Target)
- Cristian-Paul Bara (Ph.D. 2023 –> Bosch)
- Qiaozi Gao (Ph.D. 2019 –> Amazon Alexa AI)
- Shaohua Yang (Ph.D. 2019 –> Bloomberg AI)
- Lanbo She (Ph.D. 2017 –> Microsoft Research AI)
- Changsong Liu (Ph.D. 2015 –> DMAI)
- Rui Fang (Ph.D. 2014 –> DMAI)
- Tyler Baldwin (Ph.D. 2012 –> IBM Almaden Research Center)
- Matt Gerber (Ph.D. 2011 –> Assistant Professor at University of Virginia)
- Zahar Prasov (Ph.D. 2010 –> Draper Laboratory)
- Chen Zhang (Ph.D. 2010 –> Snapchat)
- Shaolin Qu (Ph.D. 2009 –> Google)
- Mingyu Sun (Ph.D. 2006 –> Director, Language Resource Center, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)
Master’s Alumni:
- Jayjun Lee (2023-2025 –> PhD at UMich)
- Zheyuan Zhang (2022-2025 –> PhD at JHU)
- Yidong Huang (2021-2025 –> PhD at UNC)
- Zekun Wang (2022-2024 –> PhD at Georgia Tech)
- Xuweiyi Chen (2022-2024 –> PhD at UVA)
- Nikhil Devraj (2022-2023 –> Research Engineer, Boston Dynamics)
Full list
- Ruohua Harold Li (M.S. 2021-2023 –> Gatik)
- Barrett Lattimer (M.S. 2021-2022 –> ASAPP)
- Wenfei Tang (M.S. 2021-2022 –> NVIDIA)
- Ben VanDerPloeg (M.S. 2021-2022)
- Tianrong Zhang (M.S. 2020-2022 –> Ph.D. at PennState)
- Qiucheng Wu (M.S. 2019-2021 –> Ph.D. at UCSB)
- James Peterkin II (M.S. 2019 –> Microsoft)
- Sari Saba-Sadiya (M.S. 2017 –> Ph.D. at MSU)
- Malcolm Doering (M.S. 2015 –> Ph.D. at Osaka University)
- Alex Peer (M.S. 2012 –> Ph.D. at Wisconsin Madison)
- Brian Romanowski (M.S. 2011 –> Nuance)
- Minghang Cai (M.S. 2007)
- Kiran Joshi (M.S. 2005)
- Vineet Bansal (M.S. 2004)
Undergrad Alumni:
- Tian Xia (2024-2025 –> MS at Harvard)
- Sihan Xu (2023-2025 –> PhD at UMich)
- Xuejun Zhang (2023-2025 –> PhD at UIUC)
- Yinong He (2023-2025 –> MSR at CMU)
- Fengyuan Hu (2023-2025 –> Research Engineer, NVIDIA Gear)
- Madhavan Iyengar (2022-2025 –> MSR at CMU)
- Sikai Li (2022-2024 –> PhD at UNC)
- Xijia Zhang (2022-2024 –> PhD at Georgia Tech)
- Jiajun Xi (2023-2024 –> MS at UCSD)
- Jiayi Pan (2021-2023 –> PhD at UCB)
- Qianqi Yan (2021-2023 –> PhD at UCSC)
Full list
- Xiaoyang Nick Hu (2021-2022 –> Brown)
- Xingyao Wang (2021-2022 –> PhD at UIUC)
- Yingzhuo Yu (2021-2022 –> MCS at UIUC)
- Xinyu Lu (2021-2022 –> MIIS at CMU)
- Eui-In Kim (2021-2022)
- Haoyi Qiu (2019-2022 –> PhD at UCLA)
- Bri Epstein (2019-2022 –> ExtraHop)
- Sky Wang (2019-2021 –> PhD at Columbia)
- Jiaxin Ying (2020-2021 –> MCS at UIUC)
- Sayan Ghosh (2019-2021 –> PhD at USC)
- Sarah Fillwock (2015-2018 –> PhD at Emory)
- James Finch (2015-2018 –> PhD at Emory)
- Kenneth Stewart (2017-2018 –> PhD at UC Irvine)
- Austin Littley (2014-2015)
- Spencer Ottarson (2012-2014)
- Cody Littley (2012-2013)
- Kenneth Hanson (2012, 2013)
- Caitlin McDonald (2012)
- Brandon Waterloo (2010)
- Dianna Kay (2010)
- Malcolm Doering (2009)
- Marie Lazar (2008-2009)
- Jacob Walker (2009)
- Roy Dong (2008)
- Timothy Aubel (2007-2008)
- Sarah Deighan (2007-2008)
- Steve Emerlander (2007)
- Hogyeong Jeong (2006)
- Tyler Baldwin (2005)
- Joseph Blaim (2004)