User:Jia Xu

I am an assistant professor at the Graduate Center and Hunter college at the City University of New York (CUNY). Prior to coming to CUNY I was an associate professor at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing). Before that I was an assistant professor for three years and as the chair of the elite CS undergraduate program, IIIS (Yao-class) at Tsinghua University (Beijing). Before Tsinghua I was a project leader and senior researcher in the language technology group at DFKI, Germany. As a graduate student I was supervised by Hermann Ney at RWTH Aachen with occasional (each a few-months long) and very fruitful visits to the speech group in IBM Watson and the NLP group in Microsoft Research (MSR) Redmond. My current research interests are in Machine Learning with a focus towards highly competitive machine translation systems. Lately, I have developed an interest and devise techniques that explore the underlying Metric and Geometric properties of machine translation systems. I am publishing in mainstream venues in computational linguistics and machine learning (e.g. AAAI, ICML, ACL) and often times I am leading teams that win first (or one of the first) position in machine translation competitions.