Author: Jianfeng Gao

Jianfeng Gao is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President of Microsoft. He is the head of the Deep Learning group at Microsoft Research, leading the development of AI systems for natural language processing, Web search, vision language understanding, dialogue, and business applications. He is an affiliate professor of Computer Science & Engineering at University of Washington, an IEEE fellow, and a Distinguished Member of ACM. Chenyan Xiong is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research at Redmond. His research area is in the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and deep learning. Chenyan is a co-founder of the TREC Conversational Assistance Track (CAs T) and has developed a series of neural approaches for conversational systems with award winning publications, covering various aspects of conversational IR systems, including conversational search, system initiatives, dialog modeling, and few-shot learning. Paul Bennett is a Partner Research Manager for the Productivity+Intelligence area in Microsoft Research. His published research has focused on a variety of topics surrounding the use of machine learning in information retrieval – including deep learning for ranking and retrieval, ensemble methods and the combination of information sources, calibration, consensus methods for noisy supervision labels, active learning and evaluation, supervised classification and ranking, crowdsourcing, behavioral modeling and analysis, and personalization. Some of his work has been recognized with awards at SIGIR, CHI, ECIR, and ACM UMAP. Nick Craswell is a Principal Architect developing Search and related functionality in Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Sharepoint. His research is on the evaluation and optimization of information retrieval systems, particularly in Web search, and more recently relating to conversational interfaces, and deep learning.