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 to ...

and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

, and a senior principal scientist for

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

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 that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (THU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Constructio ...

in 1997 and 2000, respectively. She earned her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

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 Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, 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, United States. It is the northernmost institution of the University of Texas System. It was initially founded in 1961 as a private res ...

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 is 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 area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

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 a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

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 proce ...

, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, the

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. Etymology The word ''north'' ...

, 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 by IEEE Signal Processing Society. Ei Compendex has indexed all papers included in its proceedings. The first ICASSP wa ...

. 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 an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

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

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics ''Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics'' (commonly abbreviated ''TACL'') is an annual peer-reviewed open-access academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of computational linguistics and natural language proc ...

'', 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 award is the most prestigious award presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States Federal Government to support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through rese ...

by the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

. 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 , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

"''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