Graduate Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Zhang’s career straddles two worlds. In the first, she’s an academic, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. In the second, she’s an entrepreneur, a co-founder of Rul.ai, an award-winning conversation computing platform that landed a spot on Forbes 50 Most Promising AI Companies list. She has also served as a consultant or technical adviser for several large companies and startups.
She received her Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s been at the forefront of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research for decades. Her research focuses on “two aspects, one is the impact of the problem, is the problem important to work out? Second is intellectual merit, is that problem worth research or a solution?” Her interests include large-scale information retrieval, personalized recommender systems, conversational AI, and applied machine learning. Among her many accolades: an NSF Faculty Early Career Award in 2010, an Air Force Research Young Investigator Award in 2008, and Best Paper Award at ACM SIGIR in 2002.
She teaches data mining and information retrieval courses in UC Santa Cruz’s Computer Science program and runs the Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management lab at UC Santa Cruz. Many of Zhang’s Ph.D. and Master’s students have gone on to work with NLP in industry: “The NLP program provides students with experience that people usually encounter in their first few years in industry. Being located in Silicon Valley and receiving instruction from actual industry experts are additional benefits for my students.” Her students tend to be multifaceted, but all enjoy becoming enmeshed in doing research and building solutions to solve challenging real world problems. Given the demand for NLP researchers and engineers, she’s delighted that many graduates are discovering a rewarding career waiting for them after leaving academia.
Like many of her colleagues, Zhang enjoys traveling with her family—particularly to places with interesting history and architecture. She also likes playing cards, skiing, and water activities.
Website: https://www.soe.ucsc.edu/people/yiz