Ai, Hua

Email: hua AT cs.pitt.edu


 

Education:

l                        5th Year Ph.D. student, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh

-          GPA : 3. 87

l                        Master of  Intelligent Systems, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh, 2006

-          GPA : 3. 87

l                        Bachelor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2004

-          GPA: 3.72

 

Research Experiences:

My research interests lie generally in spoken dialogue systems, with a particular interest on user simulation for dialogue manager design.

l            Sept, 2007 – Current, working with Dr. Fuliang Weng on In-Car Spoken Dialog System Development (Research Intern at Bosch Research);

l            Sept, 2005 – Current, working with Dr. Diane Litman on User Simulation for Tutoring Dialog Systems;

l            May, 2006 – Aug, 2006, Working with Dr. David Traum on Using Information-State and Speech Recognition results to improve Dialogue move and parameter tagging in a spoken dialogue system (summer internship at USC/ICT)

 

Awards:

l            2008-2009, Mellon Fellowship, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh

l            2005-2006, FSA Fellowship, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh

l            2004-2005, FSA Fellowship, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh

l            2003, Renmin Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University;

l            2001, Renmin Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University;

 

Publications:

l            Ai, H. and Weng, Fuliang. 2008. User Simulation as Testing for Spoken Dialog Systems. In Proc. 9th SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Ohio, USA.

l            Ai, H. and Litman, D. 2008. Assessing Dialog System User Simulation Evaluation Measures Using Human Judges. In Proc. 46th ACL, Ohio, USA.

l            Ai, H.; Raux, A.; Bohus, D.; Exkenazi, M.; and Litman, D. 2007. Comparing Spoken Dialog Corpora Collected with Recruited Subjects versus Real Users. In Proc. 8th SIGDial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium, September.

l            Ai, H. and Litman, D. 2007. Knowledge Consistent User Simulations for Dialog Systems. In Proc. Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium, August.

l            Ai, H.; Roque, A.; Leuski, A.; and Traum, D. 2007. Using Information State to Improve Dialogue Move Identification in a Spoken Dialogue System. In Proc. Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium, August. [poster]

l            Hua Ai, Joel R. Tetreault, and Diane J. Litman. 2007. Comparing User Simulation Models for Dialog Strategy Learning. In Proc. NAACL-HLT, Rochester, NY, April. [poster]

l            Roque, A.; Ai, H.; and Traum, D. 2006. Evaluation of an Information State-Based Dialogue Manager. Brandial 2006: The 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. Potsdam, Germany.

l            Ai, H.; Litman, D.; Forbes-Riley, K.; Rotaru, M.; Tetreault, J.; and Purandare, A. 2006. Using System and User Performance Features to Improve Emotion Detection in Spoken Tutoring Dialogs. Proceedings of Interspeech 2006 ICSLP. Pittsburgh, PA (to appear in September).

l            Ai, H. and Litman, D. 2006. Comparing Real-Real, Simulated-Simulated, and Simulated-Real Spoken Dialogue Corpora. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Statistical and Empirical Approaches for Spoken Dialogue Systems. Boston, MA.

l            Ai, H.; Harris, T.; and Rose, C. P. 2006. The Effect of Miscommunication Rate on User Response Preferences. CHI, Work-In-Progress.  Montreal, Canada. [poster]

 

Talks:

l            “Using Lexical-based Features to Predict Student Emotions during Spoken Tutoring Dialogues”, University of Pittsburgh AI Forum, March 2005.

l            “Comparing Real and Simulated Spoken Dialogue Corpora”, “Dialogs on Dialogs” Group Meeting, Carnegie Mellon University, March 2006.

l            “Comparing User Simulation Models for Dialog Strategy Learning”, University of Pittsburgh AI Forum, February 2007.

 

Activities:

l               Organizer of the 4th Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialogues Systems Workshop, 2008. (An article about the workshop is in SLTC e-newsletter: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/stc/News/NL0807/NL0807-YRR.htm )

Skills:

l            Programming Languages: C, C++, Java, SQL

l            Data Analysis: SPSS, Weka

l            Languages: English, Chinese

l            Operating Systems: Unix, Windows 2000, XP