Asli Celikyilmaz


Asli Celikyilmaz

Senior Staff Research Manager
Meta Fundamentals AI Research (Meta FAIR)

Affiliate Professor @ University of Washington
email:asli.ca@live.com

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Talks
Research
Publications
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Bio
Experience
Teaching
Awards
Service


Research Interests:


My primary research interests are in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, with broader interests in Human Computer Interaction. My research centers on building natural language agents enriched with advanced capabilities to memorize, learn and reason about social and physical world. Specifically, my research interests can be grouped into:
  • Advanced Reasoning Architectures: My recent research aims to continuously innovate AI architectures to enhance their understanding, reasoning, and planning capabilities, striving to develop systems that can autonomously adapt to new environments and solve complex, real-world problems with minimal human intervention. This initiative will focus on creating more intuitive and human-like AI by integrating cognitive science principles and advanced computational techniques to improve decision-making processes. add agentic behaviors.
  • Mental World Modeling My research explores how AI can develop mental world models to represent and reason about agents' beliefs, goals, and perspectives, enabling more sophisticated social intelligence. It also investigates how Theory of Mind capabilities in AI can enhance cooperation, value alignment, and adaptive decision-making in human-AI and multi-agent interactions.
  • Neural Language Generation and Reasoning: My research focuses on building advanced models that can generate coherent and contextually relevant outputs, as well as ground language in multimodal knowledge such as images, videos, and spatial data. This includes modeling long-term context, tracking and simulating the world represented in stories or narratives, teaching agents to write coherently, and predicting mental states in narrative by stateful language modeling. It also involves learning semantic correspondences between language and multimodal knowledge for applications such as multimodal summarization, image captioning, and neuro-symbolic and logical reasoning.


    • Selected Invited Talks and Tutorials:



    Full List of Publications:



    Peer-Reviewed Publications:


    Bio:

    Asli Celikyilmaz is a Senior Research Manager at Fundmendals AI Research (FAIR). Formerly, she was Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Redmond, Washington. She is also an Affiliate Associate Member at the University of Washington. She has received Ph.D. Degree in Information Science from University of Toronto, Canada, and later continued her Postdoc study at Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests are mainly in deep learning and natural language, specifically on language generation with long-term coherence, language understanding, language grounding with vision, and building intelligent agents for human-computer interaction She is serving on the editorial boards of Transactions of the ACL (TACL) as area editor and Open Journal of Signal Processing (OJSP) as Associate Editor. She has received several “best of” awards including NAFIPS 2007, Semantic Computing 2009, CVPR 2019, EMNLP 2023.

    Work Experience:

      2021-Present Senior Research Manager, Meta Fundamentals AI Research (Meta FAIR), Seattle, WA
      2018-Present Affiliate Professor at the Paul G. Allen School University of Washington, Seattle, WA
      2010-2021 Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
      2008-2010 Post-Doctorate Research, Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA
      2005-2008 Doctor of Philosopy, Engineering, University of Toronto
      2003-2005 Master of applied Science, Engineering, University of Toronto

    Teaching:

      2017 Lecture on Generative Adversarial Networks at the AI School at MSR AI
      2017 Lecture on Deep Learning for Interactive Systems at the AI School at MSR AI
      2007 Lecture on Knowledge Modeling and Management, Univ. of Toronto
      2006 Lecture on Data Modeling, University of Toronto
      2005 Lecture on Decision Analysis, University of Toronto

    Honors and Awards:

      Ourtanding Paper Award, EMNLP 2023
      Best Student Paper Award, CVPR 2019
      Best Paper Award, IEEE Int. Conference on Semantic Computing, Berkeley, 2009
      Postdoctoral Fellowship from British Telecom University of California, Berkeley, 2008-2010
      NSERC (Natural Sci. and Eng. Research Council of Canada), Postdoc Fellowship (PDF), 2008-2010
      NSERC (Natural Sci. and Eng. Research Council, Graduate Scholarships), PGSD2, 2007-2009
      OGS-Ontario Graduate Scholarships in Science and Technology, Ph.D., 2007-2008
      Ph.D. Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2005-2008

    Service


      Editor in Chief,TACL
      Organizing workshop at at ICML 2021 on Self-Supervised Learning for Reasoning and Perception
      Organizing workshop at Nerual Conversational AI at ICLR 2021 on safety, integrity, continual learning, and so much more!
      Panel Chair for IEEE SLT 2021
      Organized ALVR2020: Advances in Language and Vision Research Workshop at ACL 2020
      Organized NLP4CONVAI: NLP for Conversational AI Workshop at ACL 2020
      Organized 3rd Conversational AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2019
      Organized Neuralgen Workshop at NAACL 2019
      Other academic service:
          EMNLP 2022 Workshop Co-Chair
          ACL 2022 Senoir Area Chair of Generation Track
          SIGDIAL 2021 Senoir Area Chair
          ACL 2021 Area Chair for Dialog Track
          NAACL 2021 Senior Area Chair for Generation Track
          ACL 2020 Demo Chair
          Associate Editor for IEEE ODSP,
          Area Editor for Transactions of ACL (TACL),
          Editor for AI Magazine: AAAI Special Issue on Conversational AI,
          PC member for ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NIPS, CoNLL, ConvAI.