Rising Stars 2020

Ziyu Yao has been selected to participate in Rising Stars 2020, hosted by UC Berkeley. Rising Stars is an intensive workshop for women graduate students and postdocs who are interested in pursuing academic careers in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering. The workshop will be held from November 9 - 10, 2020 (virtually). 

Ziyu Yao is a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University, advised by Professor Huan Sun. She received her B.S. degree in Communication Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Her research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly building effective and trustworthy natural language interfaces (NLIs). 

She has worked as a research intern at Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft Research, Fujitsu Laboratories of America and Tsinghua University. Her work has been published at top NLP, AI, and data mining conferences such as EMNLP, the Web Conference (WWW), ACL, AAAI. She has been invited to talk at various events/places including Microsoft Research AI Breakthroughs Workshop, VMware, and ETH Zurich. 

Yao's research aims to assist humans with knowledge acquisition and programming in natural language by: (1) Constructing NLIs to computer programs, as exemplified by code generation/search/summarization tasks; (2) Human-machine collaborative NLIs, where she investigates how humans and intelligent machines can communicate and collaborate to improve task completion and enhance system trustworthiness; (3) Learning NLIs from weak user supervision, where she constructs NLIs that can continually and efficiently improve themselves by learning from users.