Jeffrey earned his Bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Master’s degree in theoretical physics from Caltech. With a strong mathematical background and a great passion in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, he then pursued his dream of doing research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Carnegie Mellon University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in NLP. His research focuses on semantic representations and deep learning in NLP, and applications such as question answering, machine translation, and summarization.

Jeffrey joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as an Assistant Professor in 2019, and during the past year he has taught undergraduate NLP and an advanced graduate seminar in NLP. For the NLP MS program, he will be teaching courses in the core NLP series (NLP I, II, and III).

He is excited to be a part of the team teaching and advising students in the NLP MS program, and is very much looking forward to teaching a new generation of NLP researchers and engineers.

Fun facts about Jeffrey: He grew up in Silicon Valley, loves the environment here (natural and technical), and his hobbies are swimming, camping, and amateur astronomy.

For more information about Prof. Flanigan, please visit: https://jflanigan.github.io

Jalal Mahmud brings deep natural language processing (NLP) expertise to the University of California, Santa Cruz. He’s been a research scientist at IBM since completing his Ph.D. in computer science at SUNY Stony Brook in 2008. Since 2014, he has been managing teams for IBM Watson group.

He also holds an M.S. in computer science (’06) from Stony Brook and a B.S. in computer science from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (’02).

Mahmud is currently tech lead and data science thought leader of IBM’s Watson group. He’s excited to join the UC Santa Cruz NLP masters program.

“This fall I’m teaching a class on data collection, wrangling and crowdsourcing,” Mahmud said. “Which overlaps nicely with the work I do at IBM. Finding, processing and handling data is a crucial skill for our students to develop. Engineers spend enormous amounts of time processing data before they can start building the machine learning models that form the backbone of most NLP projects.”

At IBM, Mahmud began his career as a research scientist, looking at web mining, intelligent user interfaces, human-computer interaction, and applied machine learning. In 2014, he moved to IBM’s Watson group (their question-answering artificial intelligence). There, Mahmud initially led Watson’s personality insight, tone analysis, and emotional analysis products. Later, he worked to develop sentiment analysis and NLP-focused products such as understanding entities and keywords, enabling products for different languages and looking for ways to accelerate the development of machine learning models.

He’s remained active in the scientific community throughout his career, publishing, patenting, reviewing papers and mentoring interns; including a pair of UC Santa Cruz Ph.D. students advised by NLP M.S. program director and computer science and engineering Professor Marilyn Walker.

“When I heard about this new NLP master’s program [at UC Santa Cruz] I was really excited,” Mahmud said, “Aside from the good experiences I had working with UC Santa Cruz faculty and students, typically M.S. programs are pretty generic but this one was designed around NLP and is the kind of program that can really advance the discipline, and launch students’ careers.”

Beyond his work at IBM and UC Santa Cruz, Mahmud enjoys travel with his family (at least before COVID-19 related shelter-in-place ordinances went into effect). They especially cherish island destinations like Hawaii and the Maldives. Closer to home, Mahmud enjoys taking photos with his phone and spending time with his daughter.

Dilek Hakkani-Tür is a distinguished visiting instructor at UC Santa Cruz and a senior principal scientist at Amazon Alexa AI. She brings deep Natural Language Processing expertise and practical experience to the program.

Dr. Hakkani-Tür received an MS (1996) and later her PhD in computer engineering from Bilkent University (2000). She also holds a BS from Middle East Technical University (1994). As a researcher, she has been granted over 70 patents, has co-authored more than 200 papers in natural language and speech processing, and won dozens of awards.

“My background is as a computer scientist,” Dr. Hakkani-Tür said. “I did my Ph.D. in computational linguistics, working with language modeling, and then became a colleague of [Program Director] Marilyn Walker’s at AT&T. Later I worked for Microsoft Cortana and am now on Amazon’s Alexa team.”

She is the recipient of three best paper awards for her work on active learning for dialogue systems, from IEEE Signal Processing Society, ISCA, and EURASIP. She served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2005-2008), a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2009-2014), an area editor for speech and language processing for Elsevier’s Digital Signal Processing Journal and IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2011-2013), and served on the ISCA Advisory Council (2015-2019). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, and a fellow of the IEEE (2014) and ISCA (2014).

She foresees plenty of work for students with strong computer science and Natural Language Processing experience.

“It’s quite a challenging field. We’re still far behind humans in terms of the ability to understand language so over the next ten to fifteen years as more NLP applications are developed and the technology improves there will be lots of work for our graduates to do.”

There has been lots of interest in the program from industry. She foresees NLP agents being developed for reading and interpreting customer reviews, interacting with customers, parsing and producing documentation, and translating among many other potential uses. She’s excited to be joining UC Santa Cruz.

“The Santa Clara campus is in the core of Silicon Valley, which is the place to be if you want to work in the area,” she said. “UC Santa Cruz has always had Natural Language Processing and I was very impressed with the students I’d met, so it’s really exciting to get a chance to impact and influence these fresh minds entering the discipline.”

Department: Computer Science and Engineering
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