UCSC Silicon Valley Campus Virtual Tour
Check out this virtual tour of the UCSC Silicon Valley Campus (SVC) created by one of our amazing NLP Student Ambassadors.
Yunyao Li: Advisory Board
Yunyao Li leads the Open Domain Knowledge team at Apple Knowledge Platform. Until early 2022, she was a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Senior Research Manager at IBM Research – Almaden where she built and managed the Scalable Knowledge Intelligence department. She is particularly known for her work in scalable NLP, enterprise search, and database usability.
She has built systems, developed solutions, and delivered core technologies to over 20 IBM products under brands such as Watson, InfoSphere, and Cognos. She has published over 80 articles and a book. She was an IBM Master Inventor, with over 50 patents filed/granted.
Her technical contributions have been recognized by prestigious awards within and outside of IBM on a regular basis. She is an ACM Distinguished Member. She was a member of the inaugural New Voices program of the American National Academies (1 out of 18 selected nationwide) and represented US young scientists at World Laureates Forum Young Scientists Forum in 2019 (1 of 4 selected nationwide).
Yunyao obtained her Ph.D degree in Computer Science & Engineering and dual-degrees of M.S.E in Computer Science & Engineering and M.S in Information from the University of Michigan. She went to college at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and graduated with dual-degrees of B.E in Automation and B.S in Economics.
Valeria de Paiva: Advisory Board
Valeria de Paiva is a mathematician, artificial intelligence scientist and logician whose work focuses on category theory, which is the study of mathematical structure and abstraction.
She recently co-founded the Topos Institute in Berkeley, CA, which aims to advance the sciences of connection and integration by looking at the mathematical frameworks of computation.
“Category theory is about connecting little pieces of mathematics and finding what they have in common. The hope of our institute is that by understanding these fundamental things more closely we’ll be able to develop new approaches to programming, including artificial intelligence and natural language processing,” de Paiva says.
At UC Santa Cruz she’s excited to help students find the cutting edge. “The beauty of UC Santa Cruz is being able to find that balance between the “head in the clouds” and “feet on the ground” approach to natural language processing.” She’s excited by the program’s proximity to Silicon Valley and the interdisciplinary research that the University is famous for.
de Paiva has held principal and senior research positions at major laboratories including the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rearden Commerce, Nuance Communications, and most recently Samsung Research America. She’s also lectured and held academic positions at the PUC-Rio, the University of Birmingham, Stanford University and Santa Clara University. She has four degrees in mathematics, including a PhD from the University of Cambridge advised by Martin Hynton.
Outside of the classroom, de Paiva is deeply committed to expanding women’s access to computer science, logic and mathematics. She created an organization called Women In Logic and has seen firsthand how badly served by academia women can be.
For more information about the Topos Institute, please visit: https://topos.institute/
Jeffrey Flanigan: Faculty
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: Faculty
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.