We aim to build an intelligent and knowledgeable conversational AI that can provide engaging and interesting user experiences with coherent and natural responses. Our HokieBot should be able to generate interesting responses to make sure users are engaged and involved in the conversation.
Ying Shen — Team leader
Shen is second-year PhD student in the computer science department at Virginia Tech. Shen's research interest is mainly in deep learning, natural language processing, and multi-modal machine learning, and embodied AI. Shen hopes is build more human-like interactive agents to better understand, interpret and reason about the world around us. She has her master's in intelligent information systems from Carnegie Mellon University.
Minqian Liu
Liu is a second-year PhD student in the computer science department at Virginia Tech. His expertise is mainly in natural language processing and deep learning, especially in knowledge acquisition and transfer in the setting of continual learning, dialogue understanding, and generation, and multi-modal learning and reasoning. He is also the team lead for the Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge.
Zhiyang Xu
Xu is a second-year PhD student in the computer science department at Virginia Tech. Xu holds a masters in computer science from University of Massachusetts Amherst where Xu worked closely with IESL and MOSAIC Lab. Xu obtained a bachelor's degree in computer systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Menglong Yao
Yao is a PhD student in computer science at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on multimodal reasoning and generative models.
Lifu Huang — Faculty advisor
Lifu Huang is an assistant professor of the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech, where he leads the Natural Language Processing Lab. At VT CS, he is also a member of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Discovery Analytics.