Lei Li

Lei Li is an assistant professor in Language Technology Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest lies in natural language processing, machine learning, and drug discovery. He received his B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation work on fast algorithms for mining co-evolving time series was awarded ACM KDD best dissertation (runner up). His recent work on AI writer Xiaomingbot received 2nd-class award of Wu Wen-tsün AI prize in 2017. He is a recipient of ACL 2021 best paper award, CCF Young Elite award in 2019, and CCF distinguished speaker in 2017. His team won first places for five language translation directions and the best in corpus filtering challenge in WMT 2020. Previously, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EECS department of UC Berkeley, a principal researcher at Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning in Silicon Valley, and at ByteDance as the founding director of AI Lab. He has served as Associate Editor of TPAMI and organizers and area chair/senior PC for multiple conferences including ACL, EMNLP, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, IJCAI, WSDM, and CIKM. He has launched ByteDance's machine translation system (VolcTrans) and Xiaomingbot automatic writing system, and many of his algorithms have been deployed in production (Toutiao, Douyin, Tiktok, Xigua, Feishu/Lark), serving over a billion users. He has delivered five tutorials at ACL 2021, EMNLP 2019, NLPCC 2019, NLPCC 2016, and KDD 2010. He was a lecturer for 2014 Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning summer school at Portland, USA.