Alumni – Artificial Intelligence

Ehsan Qasemi

Thesis Title: Multi-Modal Preconditioned Inference of Commonsense Knowledge
Advisor: Muhao Chen
Current Position: Senior Member of Technical Staff @ Oracle ML

Meryem M'hamdi

Thesis Title: Towards More Human-Like Cross-lingual Transfer Learning
Advisor: Jonathan May
Current Position: Applied and Data Scientist II at Microsoft

Umang Gupta

Thesis Title: Controlling Information in Neural Networks for Fairness and Privacy
Advisor: Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Software Engineer at Google

Sarik Ghazarian Ghalemaleki

Thesis Title: Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Nanyun Peng
Current Position: Post Doctoral Scientist at Amazon

Hrayr Harutyunyan

Thesis Title: On Information Captured by Neural Networks: Connections With Memorization and Generalization
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Research Scientist at Google

Serban Stan

Thesis Title: Unsupervised Domain Adaption with Private Data
Advisor: Mohammad Rostami
Current Position: Machine Learning Scientist at Beyond Limits AI

Sami Abu-El-Haija

Thesis Title: Fast and Label-Efficient Graph Representation Learing
Advisors: Aram Galstyan and Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Sr. Research Scientist at Google Research

Nada Aldarrab

Thesis Title: Automatic Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts
Advisor: Jonathan May
Current Position: Assistant Professor at King Abdulaziz University

Robert Brekelmans

Thesis Title: Information Geometry of Annealing Paths for Inference and Estimation
Advisor: Greg Ver Steeg
Current Position: Post Doc at Vector Institute, Toronto

Nikolaos Flemotomos

Thesis Title: Extracting and Using Speaker Role Information in Speech Processing Applications
Advisor: Shrikanth Narayanan
Current Position: Machine Learning Researcher at Apple

Thamme Gowda

Thesis Title: The Inevitable Problem of Rare Phenomena Learning in Machine Translation
Advisor: Jon May
Current Position: Research Programmer at USC/ISI

Rujun Han

Thesis Title: Improve Machine Event-Centric Reasoning with Neuro-Symbolic Networks, QA and Language Generation
Advisors:: Aram Galstyan and Nanyun Peng
Current Position: Applied Scientist at AWS AI Lab

Akira Matsui

Thesis Title: Mining and Modeling Temporal Stuctures of Human Behavior in Digital Platforms
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Asst Professor at Yokohama National University

Ninareh Mehrabi

Thesis Title: Responsible Artificial Intelligence For A Complex World
Advisors::Aram Galstyan and Fred Morstatter
Current Position: Post Doc at Amazon

Raghuveer Peri

Thesis Title: Neural Representation Learning for Robust and Fair Speaker Recognition
Advisor: Shrikanth Narayanan
Current Position: Applied Scientist at Amazon

Shen Yan

Thesis Title: Fair Machine Learning for Human Behavor Understanding
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Researcher for Meta Research

Xusen Yin

Thesis Title: Generalized Sequential Decision-Making via Language
Advisor: Jonanthan May
Current Position: Applied Scientist at Amazon

Ashok Deb

Thesis Title: Modeling Information Operations and Diffusion on Social Media Networks
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Operations Analysis Branch, US Forces-Korea, Camp Humphreys, South Korea

Adam Badawy

Thesis Title: Analysis and Prediction of Malicious Users on Online Social Networks: Applications of Machine Learning and Network Analysis in Social Science
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Principal Data Scientist at Capital One

Sahil Garg

Thesis Title: Hashcode Representations of Natural Language for Relation Extraction
Advisor: Aram Galstyan
Current Position: Vice President at Machine Learning Center of Excellence, Morgan Stanley

Palash Goyal

Thesis Title: Graph Embedding Algorithms for Attributed and Temporal Graphs
Advisor: Emilio Ferrara
Current Position: Senior Research Scientist and Project Lead, Samsung Research America

Hao Wu

Thesis Title: Building a Knowledgebase for Deep Lexical Semantics
Advisor: Jerry R. Hobbs
Current Position: Machine Learing Scientist/Engineer at Apple

Niloofar Montezeri

Thesis Title: Building a Knowledgebase for Deep Lexical Semantics
Advisor: Jerry R. Hobbs
Current Position: Lecturer at UC, Riverside

Mohsen Taheriyan

Thesis Title: Learning the Semantics of Structured Data Sources
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Software Engineer, Google

Qing Dou

Thesis Title: Beyond Parallel Data: Decipherment for Better Quality Machine Translation
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, Facebook

George Konstantinedes

Thesis Title: Scalable Data Integration Under Constraints
Advisor: Jose Luis
Current Position: Oxford University

Jeon-Hyung Kang

Thesis Title: Modeling Social and Cognitive Aspects of User Behavior in Social Media
Advisor: Kristina Lerman
Current Position: Research Scientist, Google

Yoon-sik Cho

Thesis Title: Modeling and predicting with spatial-temporal networks
Advisor: Aram Galstyan
Current Position: For this summer, Academic Mentor at UCLA

Ashish Vaswani

Title: Smaller, Faster and Accurate Models for Statistical Machine Translation
Advisor: David Chaing
Co-Advisor: Liang Huang
Current Position: Computer Scientist, USC-ISI

Dirk Hovy

Thesis Title: Learning semantic types and relations from text
Advisor: Jerry Hobbs
Current Position: Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Ardeshir Kianercy

Thesis Title: Adaptive agents on evolving network: An evolutionary game theory approach
Advisor: Aram Galstyan
Current Position: Post Doctorate fellow, Brady Urological Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital

Nadeesha Ranasinghe

Thesis Title: Learning to Detect and Adapt to Unpredicted Changes
Advisor: Wei-min Shen
Current Position: Senior Researcher at Epiphany Science and Systems (EpiSci), San Diego, CA

Jason Riesa

Thesis Title: Syntactic Alignment Models for Large-Scale Statistical Machine Translation
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Google Translate Team, Fall 2012

Rumi Ghosh

Thesis Title: Disentangling the Network: Understanding the Interplay of Topology and Synamics in Network Analysis
Advisor: Kristina Lerman
Current Position: HP Labs, Post Doctoral

Steve DeNeefe

Thesis Title: Tree-adjoining Machine Translation
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, SDL Language Weaver

Rutu Mulkar-Mehta

Thesis Title: Granular Causality for Learning by Reading
Advisor: Jerry Hobbs and Eduard Hovy
Current Position: NLP Research Scientist at Precyse Advanced Technologies

Sujith Ravi

Thesis Title: Deciphering Natural Language
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, Google

Anon Plangprasopchok

Thesis Title: Statistical Approaches for Inferring Category Knowledge from Social Annotation
Advisor: Kristina Lerman
Current Position: National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Bangkok, Thailand

Jonathan May

Thesis Title: Weighted Tree Automata and Transducers for Syntactic Natural Language Processing
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist, Language Weaver

Victoria Fossum

Thesis Title: Integrating Parsing and Word Alignment in Syntax-Based Machine Translation
Advisors:: Steven Abney and Kevin Knight
Current Position: Post-doctoral researcher at ISI

Michael Rubenstein

Thesis Title: Self-Assembly and Self-Healing for Robotic Collectives
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Harvard University, Post Doctorate Researcher

Rahul Bhagat

Thesis Title: Learning Paraphrases from Text
Advisor: Ed Hovy
Current Position: Amazon

Matthew Michelson

Thesis Title: A Reference-Set Approach to Information Extraction from Unstructured, Ungrammatical Data Sources
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Fetch Technologies

Brent Lance

Thesis Title: Procedural Animation of Emotionally Expressive Gaze Shifts in Virtual Embodied Characters
Advisor: Stacy Marsella
Current Position: Institute for Creative Technologies/Army Research Laboratory-HRED

Martin Michalowski

Thesis Title: A General Approach to Using Problem Instance Data for Model Refinement in Constraint Satisfaction Problem
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Adventium Labs

Rattapoom Tuchinda

Thesis Title: Building Mashups by Example
Advisor: Craig Knoblock

Snehal Thakkar

Thesis Title: A Data Integration Approach to Dynamically Fusing Geospatial Sources
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Research Scientist, Google Research

Feng Pan

Thesis Title: Representing Complex Temporal Phenomena for the Semantic Web and Natural Language
Advisor: Jerry Hobbs
Current Position: Natural Language Scientist at Powerset Inc.

Donghui Feng

Thesis Title: Factorizing Information Extraction from Text Corpora
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: AT&T Yellow Pages Research

Alexander M. Fraser

Thesis Title: Improved Word Alignments for Statistical Machine Translation
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Research SCientist, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Namhee Kwon

Thesis Title: Text Understanding via Semantic Structure Analysis
Advisor: Eduard Hovy

Mark Carman

Thesis Title: Learning Semantic Definitions of Information Sources on the Internet
Advisor: Craig Knoblock and Paolo Traverso (PhD degree from the University of Trento)
Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.

Dragos Stefan Munteanu

Thesis Title: "Exploiting Comparable Corpora"
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Research scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.

Soo-Min Kim

Thesis Title: "Identification, Classification, and Analysis of Opinions"
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: Postdoctoral research associate at USC/ISI

Shou-de Lin

Thesis Title: Modeling, Searching, and Explaining Abnormal Instances In Multi-Relational Networks
Advisors:: Hans Chalupsky and Kevin Knight
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the National Taiwan University

Radu Soricut

Thesis Title: Natural Language Generation for Text-to-Text Applications using an Information-Slim Representation
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Research scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.

Hal Daume III

Thesis Title: Practical Structured Learning for Natural Language Processing
Advisor: Daniel Marcu
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the University of Utah

Liang Zhou

Thesis Title: The Importance of Using Domain Knowledge in Solving Information Distillation Problems.
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: Postdoctoral research associate at USC/ISI

Ching-Chien Chen

Thesis Title: Automatically and Accurately Conflating Road Vector Data, Street Maps, and Orthoimagery
Advisor: Cyrus Shahabi and Craig Knoblock

Deepak Ravichandran

Thesis Title: Terascale Knowledge Acquisition
Advisor: Ed Hovy
Current Position: Research scientist at Google Research

Philipp Koehn

Thesis Title: Noun Phrase Translation
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh

Jay Modi

Thesis Title: Distributed Constraint Optimization for Multi-Agent Systems
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Drexel University

Greg Barish

Thesis Title: Speculative Plan Execution for Information Agents
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Scientist at Fetch Technologies

Benham Salemi

Thesis Title: Distributed Control for Chain-Type Self-Reconfigurable Robots
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Research scientist at USC/ISI

Ion Muslea

Thesis Title: Active learning with multiple views
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Researcher Scientist at SRI International

Sheila Tejada

Thesis Title: Learning object identification rules for information integration
Advisor: Craig Knoblock/Steve Minton
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Tulane University

Jafar Adibi

Thesis Title: Self-Similarity Models for Data Mining
Advisor: Wei-Min Shen
Current Position: Research scientist at USC/ISI

Irene Langkilde-Geary

Thesis Title: Automatic Sentence Generation Using a Hybrid Statistical Model of Lexical Collocations and Syntactic Relations
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University

Kenji Yamada

Thesis Title: A Syntax-Based Statistical Translation Model
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research scientist at Language Weaver, Inc.

Yaser Al-Onaizan

Thesis Title: Translating Named Entities Using Bilingual and Monolingual Resources
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Research Scientist at IBM Watson Laboratory

Rogelio Adobbati

Thesis Title: Automated synthesis of software explanations
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: AssistMed

Gal Kaminka

Thesis Title: Execution Monitoring in Multi-agent Environments
Advisor: Milind Tambe
Current Position: Assistant Professor at Bar-Ilan University

Marcelo Tallis

Thesis Title: A Script-Based Approach to Modifying Knowledge-Based Systems
Advisor: Yolanda Gil
Current Position: Research Scientist at Teknowledge

Naveen Ashish

Thesis Title: Optimizing informationmediatorsby selectively materializing data
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: NASA/Ames Research Center

Jose Luis Ambite

Thesis Title: Planning by Rewriting
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Research Scientist at USC/ISI

Chin-Yew Lin

Thesis Title: Natural Language Summarization
Advisor: Eduard Hovy
Current Position: Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research in Beijing

Chunnan Hsu

Thesis Title: Learning effective and robust semantic knowledge for database query optimization
Advisor: Craig Knoblock
Current Position: Associate Research Fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan

Jihie Kim

Thesis Title: Bounding the Cost of Learned Rules: A Transformational Approach
Advisor: Paul Rosenbloom
Current Position: Research Scientist at USC/ISI

Ben Smith

Thesis Title: Induction as Knowledge Integration
Advisor: Paul Rosenbloom
Current Position: Research staff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Richard Angros

Thesis Title: Learning What to Instruct: Acquiring knowledge from demonstrations
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson

Ishuar Chander

Thesis Title: Automatic Postediting of Documents
Advisor: Kevin Knight
Current Position: Northrup Gruman

Ali Erdem

Thesis Title: Task orientation and tailoring of interactive software explanations
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: Medical informatics company in San Diego

Randall W. Hill Jr.

Thesis Title: Impasse-Driven Tutoring for Reactive Skill Acquisition
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: Current Position: Director of USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)

Lorna Zorman

Thesis Title: Requirements Envisaging by Utilizing Scenarios
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: mother (formerly HP Labs)

Kevin Benner

Thesis Title: Software Specification via Scenarios
Advisor: W. Lewis Johnson
Current Position: CTO at a Minneapolis medical informatics company

Vibhu Mittal (1993)

Thesis Title: Generating Natural Language Descriptions with Integrated Text and Examples
Advisor: Cecile Paris
Current Position: Senior Scientist at Google, Inc. and Adjunct Faculty at CMU LTI