Gokhan Tur
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Biography
Dr. Gokhan Tur is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) expert, especially on conversational AI systems. He has been involved with Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa systems. He co-authored more than 250 papers published in journals or books and presented at conferences. He is the editor of the book entitled "Spoken Language Understanding" by Wiley in 2011. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Bilkent University, Turkey in 2000. Between 1997 and 1999, he was a visiting scholar at the CMU LTI, then the Johns Hopkins University, and the Speech Lab of SRI, CA.
At AT&T Research (formerly Bell Labs), NJ (2001-2006) he worked on pioneering conversational systems like "How May I Help You?". He worked for the DARPA GALE and CALO projects at SRI, CA (2006-2010). He was a founding member of the Microsoft Cortana team, and later the Conversational Systems Lab at Microsoft Research (2010-2016). He worked as the Conversational Understanding Architect at Apple Siri team (2014-2015) and as the Deep Conversational Understanding TLM at Google Research (2016-2018). He was a founding area director at Uber AI (2018-2020). He was a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Alexa AI (2020-2023). He is currently a Research Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Tur is also the recipient of the IEEE SPS Best Paper Award for 2020, Speech Communication Journal Best Paper awards by ISCA for 2004-2006 and by EURASIP for 2005-2006. Dr. Tur is the organizer of the HLT-NAACL 2007 Workshop on Spoken Dialog Technologies, and the HLT-NAACL 2004 and AAAI 2005 Workshops on SLU, and the editor of the Speech Communication Issue on SLU in 2006. He is also the spoken language processing area chair for IEEE ICASSP 2007, 2008, and 2009 conferences and IEEE ASRU 2005 workshop, spoken dialog area chair for HLT-NAACL 2007 conference, NLP applications area chair for HLT-NAACL 2021 conference, and organizer of SLT 2010 workshop. He has helped organization of many speech and language processing conferences in various capacities, lastly as senior area chair of EMNLP 2024.
Dr. Tur is a Fellow of IEEE, and member of ACL and ISCA. He was a member of IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) (2006-2008), member of the IEEE SPS Industrial Relations Committee (2013-2014) and an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2010-2014), and Multimedia Processing (2014-2016) journals.
Graduate Research Opportunities
Please email me if you have papers at top NLP/Speech/ML conferences (e.g., ACL, Interspeech, COLM) and interested in LLMs and ConvAI research.
Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Supervising UIUC undergraduate students, especially for thesis research, on large language models and Conversational AI areas. Experience on Huggingface libraries is required.
Research Interests
- Large Language Models
- Spoken Dialogue Systems
- Language Understanding
- Conversational AI
Research Areas
Books Edited or Co-Edited (Original Editions)
- Tur, Gokhan, and Renato De Mori. Spoken language understanding: Systems for extracting semantic information from speech. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
Honors
- IEEE Fellow for "Leadership in Spoken Language Understanding and applications to Virtual Personal Assistant products" (2020)