Fwd: LTI Colloquium: Friday, 9/21/18 - Kevin C. Knight

[Emily Ahn]

Hello everyone,

Kevin Knight will be speaking at our Colloquium this Friday, please join us!

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Tessa Samuelson <tes...@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 4:47 PM
Subject: LTI Colloquium: Friday, 9/21/18 - Kevin C. Knight
To: <lti-s...@cs.cmu.edu>

Please join us for LTI's colloquium this Friday.

Who: Kevin C. Knight

When: Friday, 9/21/18

Where: Porter Hall 100

Title: 

The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep

Abstract:  

Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been revolutionizing natural language processing and other fields.  Among other things, RNNs can assign probabilities to sequences (such as English sentences) and transform one sequence into another (such as English into French).  I will describe some of our work over the past couple of years, addressing four questions:  What are neural sequence models learning?  How can they learn better?  Are there theoretical limits?  Can they be creative?

Biography:

Kevin Knight is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at DiDi Chuxing.  He leads a DiDi lab in Los Angeles devoted to NLP research.  He was previously Dean's Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Research Director and Fellow at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI).  He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University.  Dr. Knight's research interests include human-machine communication, machine translation, language generation, automata theory, and decipherment.  He has co-authored over 150 research papers on natural language processing, including one outstanding paper award at NAACL 2018 and one best demonstration award at ACL 2018.  

Dr. Knight also co-authored the widely-adopted textbook "Artificial Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill).  In 2001, he co-founded Language Weaver, Inc., a machine translation company acquired by SDL plc in 2010.  Dr. Knight was a key researcher in programs run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  He served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for the Annual Conference of the ACL in 2005, and as General Chair for the North American ACL conference in 2016.  He is a Fellow of the ACL, a Fellow of ISI, and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 

Refreshments will be served at 4:00 in the 5th floor kitchen.

Instructor: Yulia Tsvetkov

Teaching Assistant: Emily Ahn 

See attached for poster, or click here to view on LTI's website.