AI for Conversational Search

Speaker: Yumao Lu, Ph.D.
Affiliation: BING, Partner Engineering Manager

Abstract:   This talk introduces Bing’s latest products on more conversational search and takes a peek into Bing’s on-going effort in this area. The talk starts with introducing the classic search architecture, its core problems and limitations. The unmet user needs drive the demand for a more advanced search engine: stateful search experience. Bing offered its initial answer in this domain with some of its latest releases. The new features are only the tip of the iceberg of how we consider the underlying research and engineering problems on understanding natural language, mining, representing, processing and serving Web-scale knowledge, and using the information for task completion. Some of the AI architectures, solution frameworks and future problems are then discussed.

Biography:     Dr. Lu is Partner Engineering Manager of Bing Conversational Search team and currently leading research and engineering effort on transforming Bing’s search experience from the traditional stateless search to a more stateful interaction with the goal to understand user’s intent more precisely and complete their tasks faster. Dr. Lu joined Bing in 2010 after working at Yahoo Search for 5 years and has a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from UCLA. He led the query rewriting work including query expansion, query relaxation, punctuation service, multi-query issuing and drove its quality to surpass competition based on Bing’s internal metrics at that time. In 2013, he moved to Beijing China to lead the Bing News team and turned around Bing News from a losing segment to a major winning segment against industry leaders reflected in an array of internal metrics. In late 2016, Yumao moved back to Bellevue and worked on improving Bing’s image relevance on tail and overcame once considered unsurmountable challenge and shipped a set of fundamental technologies to Bing’s image search stack with significant measurable relevance gain. 

For more information, contact Profs. Vwani Roychowdhury (vwani@ee.ucla.edu) or Lieven Vandenberghe (vandenbe@ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 11, 2018
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Location:
E-IV Faraday Room #67-124
420 Westwood Plaza - 6th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095