Tiancheng (Tony) Zhao
Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University. Research Scientist & Director of Om AI Lab.
3rd Floor, Building 2, Eastcom Technology Park
66 Dongxin Avenue
Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310053
Welcome! I am Tiancheng Zhao (赵天成), a research scientist at Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University, and I also lead the Om Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Om AI Lab). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University , Language Technologies Institute, advised by Prof. Maxine Eskenazi. My PhD dissertation Learning to Converse With Latent Actions is one of the early work in end-to-end generative model for conversational AI, advised by Prof. Maxine Eskenazi , Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency , Prof. William W. Cohen and Dr. Dilek Hakkani-Tur . Prior to that, I obtained my bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles with Summa Cum Laude and worked on speech signal processing, advised by Prof. Abeer Alwan .
I am interested in multimodal machine learning and human computer interaction. My current focus is to develop computational building blocks that connect the machine with people by innovating with the latest machine learning methods and practical system implementations.The technical challenges of this effort includes:
- Efficient Learning: develop learning algorithms that enable computers to master new skills more effectively (few-shot/zero-shot) from a variety types of training data, e.g. supervised labels, rewards, meta learning, etc.
- Multimodal Learning: build multimodal machine learning models to establish cross-modal representations that better recognize or generate high-dimensional multimodal data.
- From Perception to Action: learn better decision-making policies that deliver the optimal control output based on deep understanding of the state space.
My research outcome has a wide range of real-world applications, including conversational agents, autonomous robots, information retrieval and many other AI applications.
news
| Aug 2, 2021 | Our work on multi-modal retrieval is given an Oral talk at ACL 2021. |
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| Jun 6, 2021 | Our work on fast QA retrieval is given an Oral talk at NAACL 2021. |
| Feb 6, 2021 | Om AI Lab is officially established at Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University. |
experience
| 2021 - Today | Research Scientist, Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University |
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| 2019 - 2021 | Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Soco Inc. |
| 2016 - 2019 | Ph.D. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University |
| 2014 - 2016 | M.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University |
| 2010 - 2014 | B.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles |
awards
| 2021 | National Breakthrough Technology Award by Ministry of Science and Technology. |
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| 2018 | Microsoft Research Best & Brightest PhD |
| 2018 | Best Paper Award at SGIDIAL 2018 |
| 2016 | Best Paper Nomination Award at SGIDIAL 2016 |
| 2014 | Outstanding Bachelor of Science Award, UCLA EE Class of 2014. (Top 1 graduate in the department) |