Permanent Staff
E-mail: emine.yilmaz@ucl.ac.uk
Address: 90 High Holborn, London, UK
Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) in Machine Learning.
E-mail: aldo.lipani@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Postdoc Researcher
My research topics lie in dialogue systems and explainable artificial intelligence. I am interested in improving dialogue systems via natural language generation and explaining the properties of deep latent variable models. Currently, I am focusing on task-oriented dialogue systems and information retrieval.
E-mail: ruizhe.li@ucl.ac.uk
Address: 90 High Holborn, London, UK
Procheta Sen
My research topic is Proactive Information Retrieval (PIR), which involves investigating automatically anticipating a user’s information need from her activity context and suggesting relevant information without the user requiring to submit queries explicitly. In WI, I am working on task-based information retrieval systems.
E-mail: p.sen@ucl.ac.uk
Address: 90 High Holborn, London, UK
PhD Students
Sahan’s interests lie on the theme: “Improving Recommendations of Educational Contents to Lifelong Learners”. He is a recipient of multiple research fellowships including UCL Advances (twice), Cisco CIIP and UCL Departmental Scholarship. Sahan currently contributes to the X5GON project. His current research is motivated towards developing scalable, automatic quality assurance models for educational resources and modelling the knowledge state of lifelong learners to identify the most helpful educational resources that will enable them to achieve their learning goals.
E-mail: m.bulathwela@ucl.ac.uk
Address: 90 High Holborn, London, UK
Omer Kirnap
E-mail: omer.kirnap.18@ucl.ac.uk
Address: 90 High Holborn, London, UK
Fanghua’s primary research interests lie in conversational AI, neural semantic parsing, information retrieval, social network analysis, and machine learning. Currently, he is focused on task-oriented dialogue systems and conversational question answering.
E-mail: fanghua.ye.19@ucl.ac.uk
Address: 90 High Holborn, London, UK
My research interests lie in the area of machine learning, particularly in spatial language understanding and conversational systems. I focus on improving common-sense reasoning in conversational agents by equipping them with abilities to infer and understand spatial relations in natural language (e.g., understand and follow humans’ sequential spatial instructions).
E-mail: zhengxiang.shi.19@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Xiao Fu
My research interests lie in machine learning (both theory and practice) and conversational information retrieval. I am now focusing on the evaluation of conversational search systems through users’ simulations.
E-mail: xiao.fu.20@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Jerome Ramos
My research focuses on conversational systems and explainable artificial intelligence. I am interested in developing conversational agents that provide transparency of user preferences and system recommendations through natural language explanations.
E-mail: jerome.ramos.20@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Zhihui Song
My research interests lie in combining structured (e.g., knowledge base) and unstructured information sources (e.g., documents) to answer users’ questions in conversational search systems in the healthcare domain.
E-mail: zhihui.song.21@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Visiting Research Students
My research interests lie in the design and evaluation of machine learning models with applications to information access systems, including recommender systems, and conversational systems. I am currently focusing on multimodality (voice and vision) and asking clarifying questions in task-based dialogue systems, as well as user behaviour modelling and personalization in recommender systems.
E-mail: h.rahmani@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
My research interests lie in the field of conversational search systems (CSS). I am currently working on the development of advanced Machine Learning methods for extracting and representing multimodal user behavioural models in CSS through the assessment of users’ confidence and level of expertise trough speech.
E-mail: youjing.yu@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Undergraduate Research Students
I am a final year MEng Computer Science student at UCL. My research aims at finding ways to encode human knowledge in language models and make it retrievable by question-answering and conversational systems.
E-mail: to.kim.17@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Gower St., London, UK
Previous Members
- Dr Qiang Zhang, PhD Student (2016-2020) and Postdoc researcher (2020-2021) (now Principal Investigator at Zhejiang University)
- Dr Jarana Manotumruksa, Postdoc researcher (2019-2021)
- Flavia Salutari, Visiting researcher (2020-2021)
- Dr Bhaskar Mitra, PhD student (2020, now a principal applied scientist at Microsoft Artificial Intelligence)
- Dr Andrew Burnie, PhD student (2017-2020)
- Sebastin Santy, Research intern (Summer 2018)
- Dr Rishabh Mehrotra, PhD student (2014 – 2018, now research scientist in Spotify)
- Dr Manisha Verma, PhD student (2013 – 2017, now research scientist in Yahoo)
- Dr Shangsong Liang, Postdoc researcher (2015 – 2017, now professor in Sun Yat-sen University)
- Dr Mengdie Zhuang, Research intern, Turing Institute (Summer 2017, now a research fellow at UCL)
- Dr Jiyin He, Visiting researcher (2015 – 2016, now senior data scientist in Signal Media)