1. "Historical Analysis of Legal Opinions with a Sparse Mixed-Effects Latent Variable Model", accepted as a full paper for oral presentation at ACL 2012
2. "Love ya, jerkface": using Sparse Log-Linear Models to Build Positive (and Impolite) Relationships with Teens, accepted as full paper for oral presentation in SIGDIAL 2012 .
3. "Automatic Detection of Speaker State: Lexical, Prosodic, and Phonetic Approaches to Level-of-Interest and Intoxication Classification", accepted to the Computer Speech and Language journal, 2012.
4. I am currently working with Dan Bohus, Ece Kamar and Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research Redmond.
5. I am very honored to receive the Student Travel Award of ACL 2012 supported by the Donald and Betty Walker Student Scholarship Fund.

I am a PhD research fellow at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Justine Cassell of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Prof. Alan W. Black of LTI. I have broad interests in Computational Linguistics, Spoken Language Processing, Affective Computing, Spoken Dialog Systems, Question Answering, Multimodal Interactions, Machine Learning and Virtual Humans. Previously, I received my M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University, focusing on speech and language processing. My advisors at Columbia were Prof. Kathy McKeown and Prof. Julia Hirschberg.

In the Summer of 2010, I was a Visiting Researcher in Prof. David Traum's natural language dialogue group at the Institute for Creative Technology, University of Southern California, working on natural language understanding, question answering from speech, speech synthesis, and spoken dialog system. From 2008 to 2009, I was working as a Research Assistant at Ambient Intelligent and Multimodal System Lab, Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)/Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Prior to that, I worked with Dr. J.Y. Chen on Semantic P2P Search and received my B.E. Summa Cum Laude in Computer Science from Shenzhen University in 2009.

I regularly publish at top conferences and journals such as ACL, COLING, SIGDIAL, IJCNLP, INTERSPEECH, ASRU and CSL. I now serve as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2010), IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2011)and IEEE Communications Letters (2010, 2011). I'm on the Organizing Committee of the 7th Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS 2011), Portland, Oregon. I've also worked as a Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft in 2008. Besides academia, I do live in the real world. I have a National Badminton Coaching Certificate from State General Administration of Sports, China. I also enjoy cooking very spicy food, which you might hear it from my neighbors.

Active projects:
* Spoken Dialog System for Child
* Learning to Predict Impoliteness in Teenagers' Peer Conversations
* Sparse Log-Linear Latent Variable Models for NLP, Speech and Dialogue
* Sparse Mixed-Effects Model for Historical Analysis of Legal Opinions

Past projects:
* DARPA GALE Question Answering: Biography and Reaction to Events
* Semi-supervised Event Description Identification
* Detecting Levels of Interest from Speech
* Intoxication Detection from German Speech
* Conversational Speech Synthesis
* Spoken Language Understanding
* Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia Articles
* Automatic Chinese Dialect/Accent Identification
* Computer-assisted Language Learning for Chinese Learners of English
* Semantic Search Algorithms for Peer-to-peer Network
* Two-factor Authentication for Anti-phishing Identity Management