Research

We aim to develop a systematic framework for robots to build models of the world and to use these to make effective and safe choices of actions to take in complex scenarios.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been a grand challenge machine learning problem for decades. Our ongoing research in this area examines the use of deep learning models for distant and noisy recording conditions, multilingual, and low-resource scenarios.

We study the fundamentals of Bayesian optimization and develop efficient Bayesian optimization methods for global optimization of expensive black-box functions originated from a range of different applications.

Traffic is not just a nuisance for drivers: It’s also a public health hazard and bad news for the economy.

Clinical concept extraction (CCE) of named entities - such as problems, tests, and treatments - aids in forming an understanding of notes and provides a foundation for many downstream clinical decision-making tasks. Historically, this task has been posed as a standard named entity recognition (NER) sequence tagging problem, and solved with feature-based methods using hand-engineered domain knowledge. Recent advances, however, have demonstrated the efficacy of LSTM-based models for NER tasks, including CCE. This work presents CliNER 2.0, a simple-to-install, open-source tool for extracting concepts from clinical text. CliNER 2.0 uses a word- and character- level LSTM model, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For ease of use, the tool also includes pre-trained models available for public use.

Multi-robot path planning for robot swarms that can both fly and drive

The MOOC Learner Project provides learning scientists, instructional designers and online education specialists with open source software that enables them to efficiently extract teaching and learning insights from the data collected when students learn on the edX or open edX platform.

We are developing a general framework that enforces privacy transparently enabling different kinds of machine learning to be developed that are automatically privacy preserving.

Our research seeks to discover best practices for using avatars to enhance performance, engagement, and STEM identity development for diverse public middle and high school computer science students. As sites of our research we run workshops in which students learn computer science in fun, relevant ways, and develop self-images as computer scientists.

All humans process vast quantities of unannotated speech and manage to learn phonetic inventories, word boundaries, etc., and can use these abilities to acquire new word. Why can't ASR technology have similar capabilities? Our goal in this research project is to build speech technology using unannotated speech corpora.

To understand human intelligence, we must be able to model how humans understand stories from multiple characters' perspectives.