Biography
Hello! This is Jianing “Jed” Yang (杨佳宁). I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan. I am a member of SLED lab, advised by Prof. Joyce Chai. I do research on natural language understanding, particularly those grounded to robots and physical world. I am interested in building NLP algorithms and systems that enable human-robot communication and collaboration through natural language.
Before joining UMich, I obtained my Master’s in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University where I worked with Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency and Prof. Matt Gormley on Multimodal Natural Language Understanding, Dataset Bias Analysis, and Machine Learning. I got my Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
Before I delved fully into research, I had worked as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, intern and full-time.
Outside of work, you will find me skiing/cooking/baking/photographing.
- Robot NLP
- Interactive Task Learning
- Multimodal Machine Learning
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, 2025 (expected)
University of Michigan
M.S. in Machine Learning, 2020
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S. in Computer Science, 2018
Georgia Institute of Technology
News
- [May 2023] We open-sourced the 📸 Chat-with-NeRF (Twitter: 1, 2) project with a live demo. Try it out - chat with a 3D room and let us know what you think! 🙌
- [Apr. 2023] Team SEAGULL advanced to one of the five finalists for the SimBot Challenge and was covered by U-M CSE News! 🎉
- [Feb. 2023] Team SEAGULL was selected as one of the 2023 Amazon Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge semi-finalists! 💪
- [Oct. 2022] Our paper DANLI was accepted to EMNLP 2022 (oral)!
- [Aug. 2022] Team SEAGULL advanced to Phase Two of the 2023 Amazon Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge! I will continue to co-lead our team with Yichi to represent UMich! 🎉
- [July 9th-17th 2022] I will attend NAACL 2022 in-person in Seattle! Hit me up!
- [May 2022] I passed my qualification exam and became a Ph.D. candidate 🙌
- [Nov. 2021] We applied and were selected as one of the First Amazon Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge participants! I will be co-leading Team SEAGULL with Yichi to represent UMich!. 🎉
- [Aug. 2021] I started my Ph.D. at University of Michigan!
- [Mar. 2021] 🎉 Our paper MTAG was accepted to NAACL 2021! The code is available here.
- [Dec. 2020] 🎉 I finished my Master’s and graduated from CMU! 🎉 I will continue to stay as a Research Assistant at CMU’s MultiComp lab until my PhD starts in Fall 2021.
- [Nov. 2020] I’m attending EMNLP 2020 virtually. Happy to chat there!
- [July 2020] I’m attending ACL 2020 virtually. Check out our video presentation on QA bias analysis!
Publications
What Gives the Answer Away? Question Answering Bias Analysis on Video QA Datasets
SUOD: Toward Scalable Unsupervised Outlier Detection
Blogs
Academia Experience
- Designed a graph neural network (GNN) algorithm for fusion of multimodal temporal data
- Analyzed language artifacts in video QA datasets
- Built pipeline for multimodal question answering about social situations
- Coordinated annotation of dataset
- Advisor: Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency
- Designed new algorithms to improve scheduled sampling training for seq2seq models
- Validated effectiveness of the method on NER, Machine Translation and Text Summarization tasks
- Advisor: Prof. Matt Gormley
- Built cardiac arrest prediction pipeline using multimodal temporal data collected from ICU patients
- Advisor: Prof. Jimeng Sun
Industry Experience
Led a load balancing project to decrease system latency from 20 seconds to milliseconds.
Received award for technical soundness and leadership at 2019 Q2 AWS Identity organization meeting.