Dr. Asli Celikyilmaz is a Senior Scientist at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus since 2010. Previously, she was a Postdoc Researcher at the EECS Department of the UC Berkeley from 2008 until 2010. She has worked with researchers at ICSI @ Berkeley during her postdoc research study. She has received her Ph.D. from University of Toronto, Canada in 2008.

Asli's research interests mainly focus on learning algorithms relating to understanding natural language. Her research include topics relating to natural language understanding, semantic tagging of natural user utterances of human to machine conversations, text analysis, document summarization, question answering, co-reference resolution, to name a few. In addition, she is interested in machine learning algorithms including structured prediction, semi and unsupervised learning and Bayesian inference. She is also member of the Berkeley Soft Computing lab. She has served as area chair and organizing committee of several NLP and Speech conferences including ACL, NAACL, InterSpeech, IEEE Spoken Language Technologies (SLT), to name a few. 

slunips15@gmail.com

Dr Milica Gašić is a Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College and a Senior Research Associate in the Dialogue Systems Group, University of Cambridge. She obtained her first degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Belgrade in 2006. Since then she has been at the University of Cambridge, first as an MPhil student studying computer speech, text and Internet technology at the Computer Laboratory. In 2011. she completed a PhD in statistical dialogue modelling under the supervision of Prof Steve Young at the Engineering Department. Milica's research interests lie in various aspects of spoken dialogue systems and in particular decision-making. She is interested in applying machine learning methods to model human–computer dialogue with the aim of building systems that can learn directly from human interaction. She has published around 40 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers in the area and she received the Sigdial 2013 conference best paper award. She was a technical area leader in the EU FP7 PARLANCE project. She served on the organising committee of Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems in 2009.

slunips15@gmail.com

Dr. Dilek Hakkani-Tür is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft, she was a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) speech group (2006-2010) and she was a senior technical staff member in the Voice Enabled Services Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, NJ (2001-2005). She received her BSc degree from Middle East Technical University, in 1994, and MSc and PhD degrees from Bilkent University, Department of Computer Engineering, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. 

Her research interests include natural language and speech processing, spoken dialog systems, and machine learning for language processing. She has 38 patents that were granted and co-authored more than 150 papers in natural language and speech processing. She is the recipient of three best paper awards for her work on active learning, from IEEE Signal Processing Society, ISCA and EURASIP. She was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2005-2008), an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2009-2012), an area editor for speech and language processing for Elsevier's Digital Signal Processing Journal and IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2011-2013). She was selected as a Fellow of the IEEE and ISCA in 2014. 

Related to this woprkshop, she chaired several workshops on spoken language understanding (AAAI 2005, Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding, co-chair; HLT/NAACL 2004 Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems, co-chair; IEEE Spoken Language Technologies (SLT) Workshop 2014 and 2016, technical chair; IEEE SLT Workshop 2010, chair), and she was the spoken language processing area chair for several other speech and NLP conferences (such as NAACL, and Interspeech).

slunips15@gmail.com