Yang Liu ( zh, 刘扬) is a Chinese and American computer scientist specializing in

speech processing Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of signals. The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied t ...

and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, and a senior principal scientist for

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

Education

Yang Liu obtained her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (; abbreviation, abbr. THU) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Minis ...

in 1997 and 2000, respectively. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

in 2004. Her dissertation was titled "Structural event detection for rich transcription of speech," focusing on the automatic detection of several structural events in speech.

Career and research

After postdoctoral research at the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

, she became an assistant professor of Computer Science at the

University of Texas at Dallas The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD or UT Dallas) is a public research university in Richardson, Texas. It is one of the largest public universities in the Dallas area and the northernmost institution of the University of Texas system. It wa ...

in 2005, and was tenured as an associate professor there in 2011. She moved from academia to

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

in California in 2015, but retained her faculty position in Dallas on leave until 2018. Meanwhile, she was a visiting scientist at Google Research from 2015 to 2016, a researcher for

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

from 2016 to 2017, and head of the AI lab for LAIX Inc. from 2017 to 2019. In 2019, she took her present position at Amazon, as a principal scientist for Alexa AI. Yang Liu's research spans multiple areas in natural language processing and speech processing. Her work has been published at multiple computer science, computational linguistics, and speech processing conferences. These include the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) is a leading conference in the area of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Along with the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), it is one of the two primary ...

, the

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) provides a regional focus for members of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in North America North America is a continent in the Nort ...

, and the

International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing ICASSP, the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, is an annual flagship conference organized of IEEE Signal Processing Society. All papers included in its proceedings have been indexed by Ei Compendex. The first ICA ...

. She has held several editorial and committee roles. She served as a Senior Associate Editor for

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, an action editor for

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics Transaction or transactional may refer to: Commerce * Financial transaction, an agreement, communication, or movement carried out between a buyer and a seller to exchange an asset for payment *Debits and credits in a Double-entry bookkeeping sys ...

, and as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. Additionally, she served as the General Chair for ACL 2023.

Recognition

In 2009, Yang Liu received the prestigious

NSF CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

. Also, she was also recipient of the Air Force Young Investigator Program Award, 2010, for ''"computational modeling of emotions and affect in social-cultural interaction". In 2021, Liu was named an

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

"''for contributions to speech understanding and language learning technology''". In the same year, she was also named a Fellow of the

International Speech Communication Association The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a non-profit organization and one of the two main professional associations for speech communication science and technology, the other association being the IEEE Signal Processing Society ...

, "for her contributions to speech recognition and understanding, prosody modelling, summarization, sentiment analysis, and social media research".

Selected publications

References

External links

Yang Liu, Senior Principal Scientist
Amazon Science * {{DEFAULTSORT:Liu, Yang Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Chinese computer scientists Chinese women computer scientists American computer scientists American women computer scientists Speech processing researchers Tsinghua University alumni Purdue University alumni University of Texas at Dallas faculty Amazon (company) people Fellows of the IEEE