Events Calendar

CS Tech Talk: DiDi Tech Talk with Dr. Fengmin Gong and Dr. Kevin Knight

Speaker: Dr. Fengmin Gong and Dr. Kevin Knight, Didi

Talk Title: Talk 1: AI for Transportation; Talk 2: The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep

Series: Computer Science Colloquium

Abstract: We are pleased to announce two talks during this colloquium.

Talk 1: Taming Technologies and Transforming Transportation
The world is at the dawn of a Fourth Industrial Revolution fueled by big data, AI, automation, vehicle electrification, and the sharing economy -“ and with this, comes both excitement for the prospect of changing society for the better, and fear of a possible threat to humanity.

Our mission at DiDi is to build a better journey, and we believe we can tame the revolution by designing and building technologies that meet the needs of people, democratize access and benefits, and are aligned with human values.

In this talk, we will share how our R&D teams in the Americas and China work side-by-side to provide rideshare experiences that are safe, convenient and affordable. We will also highlight our continuous research and work on advanced initiatives in safety and security, customer support, smart transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and AI.


Talk 2: The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep
Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been revolutionizing natural language processing and other fields. Among other things, RNNs can assign probabilities to sequences (such as English sentences) and transform one sequence into another (such as English into French). I will describe some of our work over the past couple of years, addressing four questions: What are neural sequence models learning? How can they learn better? Are there theoretical limits? Can they be creative?


This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


Biography: Talk 1: Fengmin is a well-respected technologist in cybersecurity with more than 30 years experience. He is also a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Fengmin has been a founder and senior executive in several leading security companies. Among them are Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, McAfee and Cyphort. He is a trusted advisor to many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. He has 18 awarded patents and over 40 technical publications in security and networking.

Talk 2: Kevin Knight is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at DiDi Chuxing. He leads a DiDi lab in Marina del Rey devoted to NLP research. He is also Dean's Professor of Computer Science at USC (on leave). He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. Dr. Knight's research interests include human-machine communication, machine translation, language generation, automata theory, and decipherment. He has co-authored over 150 research paper on natural language processing, including best paper/demo awards at AAAI 2000, ACL 2001, NAACL 2009, ACL 2017, ACL 2018, and NAACL 2018. Dr. Knight also co-authored the widely-adopted textbook "Artificial Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill). In 2001, he co-founded Language Weaver, Inc., a machine translation company acquired by SDL plc in 2010. Dr. Knight was a key researcher in programs run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for the Annual Conference of the ACL in 2005, and as General Chair for the North American ACL conference in 2016. He is a Fellow of the ACL, a Fellow of ISI, and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


Host: Computer Science Department

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Computer Science Department