Research students

Much have I learned from my teachers, more from my colleagues, but most from my students.

—Talmud

Students

PhD advisees

Alumni

PhD

  • Michael Auli, PhD 2012. Now at Facebook AI Research.
    Michael's thesis applied advanced machine learning techniques to a parser for combinatory categorial grammar, a linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It remained state-of-the-art for several years afer he developed it. After graduation Michael began working on neural translation, and is one of the key researchers behind Facebook's convolutional neural machine translation system.
  • Federico Fancellu, PhD 2018, co-advised with Bonnie Webber. Now at Samsung AI Center.
    Federico's thesis developed state-of-the-art models for computational detection of negation in English and Chinese. During his postdoc with Mirella Lapata, he collaborated with Sorcha Gilroy on semantic parsing.
  • Sorcha Gilroy, PhD 2019. Now at peak.ai.
    Sorcha's thesis surveys a range of mathematical tools for probabilistic generative models of graphs, and presents several new results. Among her many accomplishments as a PhD student, she won an outstanding paper award at NAACL 2018.
  • Nikolay Bogoychev, PhD 2019. Now postdoc at the University of Edinburgh.
    Nikolay's thesis shows how careful thinking about memory accesses yields simple and very fast algorithms for machine translation on parallel hardware. He is continuing this work as a postdoc in the machine translation group at Edinburgh.
  • Clara Vania, PhD 2020. Now postdoc at New York University.
    Clara's thesis teases apart the interaction between morphology, typology, and character-level neural models, showing where the latter successfully mimic the mapping from form to function, and cases where they don't.
  • Arabella Jane Sinclair, PhD 2020, co-advised with Dragan Gašević and Chris Lucas. Now postdoc at University of Amsterdam.
    Arabella's thesis shows that when learning a second language through conversation, students and their tutors adapt to each other across many different dimensions, and that the nature of this adaptation depends on the student's ability in the language.
  • Sameer Bansal, PhD 2020, co-advised with Sharon Goldwater and Herman Kamper. Now researcher at Bloomberg.
    Sameer's thesis pushes the limits of what kind of system it is possible to build if you only have a few hours of speech paired with translations, with potential applications in language documentation and crisis response.

Master’s

  • Despoina Christou, MSc 2016. Now PhD student at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
  • Yova Kementchedjhieva, MSc 2017. Now PhD student at University of Copenhagen.
  • Junyi Li, MSc 2017.
  • Moise Lubwimi, MInf 2018.
  • Evangelia Lypiridi, MSc 2016.
  • Lena Reisinger, MInf 2017.
  • Adithya Renduchintala, I was Adi's PhD advisor during his first year at Johns Hopkins University, and he amicably switched advisors when I moved to the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD at JHU and is now a research scientist at Facebook AI.
  • Jason R. Smith, former PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. Now at Google.
  • Ida Szubert, MSc 2016. Now PhD student at University of Edinburgh, advised by Mark Steedman.
  • Ieva Vasiljeva, MSc 2017. Now at Improbable.
  • Arthur Verkaik, MInf 2017.
  • Justas Zemgulys, MInf 2018. Now at Amazon.

Undergraduates

  • Ramona Comanescu, BSc 2018. Now MPhil student in Cambridge.
  • Iulia Banghea, BSc 2017.

Visiting students

  • Antonios Anastasopoulos, Visiting PhD student from University of Notre Dame, spring 2017. Collaborating with Sameer Bansal and Sharon Goldwater.
  • Chip Huyen, Visiting BSc student from Stanford University, summer 2016.
  • Katarzyna Pruś, Visiting BSc student from University of Dundee, summer 2015. MPhil at University of Cambridge, now back in Edinburgh at the CDT in Data Science.
  • Pijus Simonaitis, Visiting MSc student from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, summer 2016. Now PhD student at Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics.

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