Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces

Yunyao Li is a Senior Research Manager and Research Staff Member with IBM Research - Almaden. She is also a Master Inventor and a member of IBM Academy of Technology. Her expertise is in the interdisciplinary areas of databases, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and information retrieval. Her contributions in these areas have led to over 50 research publications, more than 20 patents granted or filed, multiple graduate-level courses (including 2 Massive Open Online Courses), and billions of revenue generated from technology transfer. She is widely recognized in these areas both within IBM and by the external research community, and regularly serves on prestigious program committees, editorial boards, and review panels. Her current research interest focuses on taming unstructured and semi-structured content to enable the building of new generations of AI applications for the enterprise. Yunyao is also passionate about improving the diversity forthe STEM field. She has been actively mentoring women and under-represented minorities for over ten years. She received her Ph.D. and masterâ?Ts degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and undergraduate degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.Davood Rafiei did his undergrad work at the Sharif University of Technology, his M.Sc. at the University of Waterloo, and his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto before joining the University of Alberta, where he is now Associate Professor of Computer Science and member of the Database Systems Research Group. His areas of expertise, which span over databases and the Web, is on managing large complex data. In particular, his research interest includes natural language data management and integration, spatial analysis and mining of web content, similarity-based queries and indexing, and web information retrieval. Davood regularly serves in the program committees of major database and data mining conferences (such as SIGMOD, VLDB, KDD, ICDM, CIKM) and Web conferences (such as WWW). Davood has spent time, as a visiting scientist, at Google (Mountain View), Kyoto University, and the University of Paris Descartes.