Joyce Y. Chai

Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
3632 Beyster
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
Office phone: 1-734-764-3308
Email: chaijy AT umich.edu

Teaching  |  Research  Brief Bio   | SLED

My research interests are in the area of natural language processing, situated dialogue agents, human-robot communication, and artificial intelligence. I'm particuarly interested in language processing that is sensorimotor-grounded, pragmatically-rich, and cognitively-motivated. My recent work has focused on grounded language processing to facilitate situated communication with robots and other artificial agents. I'm a member of Michigan AI Lab and direct the Situated Langauge and Embodied Dialogue (SLED) research group . I am also affiliated with Michigan Robotics Institute.


Brief Bio

Joyce Chai is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining UM in 2019, she was a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. She also spent a couple years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member before joining MSU in 2003. Her research interests include natural language processing, situated dialogue, human-robot communication, and artificial intelligence. Her recent work explores the intersection of language, vision, and robotics, particularly focusing on grounded language processing to facilitate situated communication with robots and other artificial agents. She has served on the executive board of North America Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), as a Program Co-chair for multiple conferences - most recently the 2020 Annual Meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and as an associate editor for several journals including Computational Linguistics, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and ACM Transaction on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS). She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award (2004), the William Beal Distinguished Scholar Award from MSU (2018), and a number of paper awards including the Best Long Paper Award from ACL (2010) and an Outstanding Paper Award from EMNLP (2021). She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University.