First time participating team aims for their taskbot to present information differently based on a user’s skill level, acting as a personalized mentor. The team also plans for skill level elicitation, through implicit and explicit interactions, to provide users additional personalization.
Alex Gonzalez - Team leader
Rey (Alex) Gonzalez is a PhD student in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. After a decade in motion picture production and in studio business development, he is currently interested text clustering, classification, but especially humor detection.
Jacob Zietek
Zietek is interested in artificial intelligence and deep learning, and how developments in these fields can be applied to the real world. He is experienced in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and Deep Reinforcement Learning. He is particularly interested in applications to robotics, autonomous vehicles, conversational bots, healthcare, and other domains where autonomous systems are required to make important decisions. He is also interested in working on any R&D effort to make intelligent systems and has worked as an intern for Amazon HSST's Applied Science team and created a recommender engine related to healthcare with NLP elements.
Jinen Setpal
Setpal is a second-year undergraduate studying Data Science at Purdue University and works part-time as a Machine Learning Engineer @ DagsHub. He loves research – especially within academia. He is interested in Machine Vision, NLP & Machine Interpretability. He has published peer-reviewed papers and has pending patents within these domains.
Jack Lambert
Lambert is a Digital Criminology student at Purdue University, with research interests in security and machine learning. He has experience with assisting AKRaNLU research projects, originally parsing law enforcement evidence for a linguistic forensics tool, CATTbot. He is also involved with the Purdue Capture The Flag (CTF) club, B0ilers, which hosts casual penetration testing competitions, and the Innocence Project, which campaigns for wrongly convicted prisoners.
Yifei Hu
Hu is a Ph.D. Candidate at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. His recent research interests focus on evaluating and improving the user experience of natural language processing applications. With a solid background in full-stack software development and a wealth of experience working closely with real-world problems and users, Yifei brings a unique perspective to his research and is dedicated to work on solutions with a meaningful impact to the world.
Damin Zhang
Zhang is a second year Ph.D. student of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University focusing on information extraction and knowledge representation in conversation systems. He is also interested in how intelligent assistant systems can understand language intents of complex utterances in a self-motivated approach. Another competition Damin wants to join is powerlifting.
Julia Rayz - Faculty advisor
Rayz is a Professor of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA and a director of the Applied Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding (AKRaNLU) laboratory. She has over two decades of experience in the IT industry and academia. In addition to the broad areas of KR and NLU, she is interested in computational understanding of humor, and has severed in various capacities on the editorial boards of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research and European Journal of Humour Research.
