Research Team
Joyce Y. Chai
Professor
Yinpei Dai
Ph.D. Candidate
Spoken Language Understanding, Dialogue Management, Natural Language Generation
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
Hongze Fu
Graduate Research Assistant
Vision-Language-Action Models, Robot Learning, Robot Foundation Models
Yunqi "Rick" Zhao
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Multimodal Agents, Video Understanding, Human-AI Interaction
Alumni
Ph.D. Alumni:
- Ziqiao Ma (Ph.D. 2026 –> Thinking Machines)
- 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:
- Shuyu Wu (2024-2026 –> PhD at Waterloo)
- Jung-Chun Liu (2024-2026)
- Andy Chung (2023-2025)
- Ruixuan Deng (2024-2025 –> PhD at Georgia Tech)
- 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)
Full list
- Nikhil Devraj (2022-2023 –> Research Engineer, Boston Dynamics)
- 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:
- Itamar Bar-Yossef (2023-2025 –> PhD at Rice)
- Alexander De La Iglesia (2022-2025)
- Megan Su (2022-2025)
- 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)
Full list
- Jiajun Xi (2023-2024 –> MS at UCSD)
- Jiayi Pan (2021-2023 –> PhD at UCB)
- Qianqi Yan (2021-2023 –> PhD at UCSC)
- 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)