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.

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.

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/

During his career, Dr. Sankar has worked in the areas of speech recognition, natural language processing, display power management and search and recommendation systems, the common denominator being the development of innovative machine learning algorithms targeted for real applications.

At UC Santa Cruz he is advising the NLP MS program. In the program, he has guest lectured and, as an advisor, brings the perspective of someone who frequently hires engineers that do applied research and development in the areas of NLP and machine learning. The program is also a chance for Dr. Sankar to experience his fondness for academia. He began his career as a lecturer at the University of Pune in India and has taught various NLP and deep-learning related classes at Stanford, UCLA, and USF, and guided a PhD student at Stanford.

Dr. Sankar holds a PhD from Rutgers University (1991), and an MS from SUNY Stony Brook, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from I.I.T. Kanpur, India, in 1986.

When he isn’t working on cutting edge research, Dr. Sankar enjoys music. He’s an amateur guitar player and singer, and is fond of bands like The Beatles, James Taylor, and Pink Floyd.