Lab Members

Faculty

Dilek Hakkani-Tür

IEEE Fellow, ISCA Fellow, Amazon Scholar, TACL co-editor-in-chief, SIGdial President

MS/PhD Bilkent Univ, BS METU

Past Affiliations: Amazon Alexa, Google Research, Microsoft Research, ICSI, AT&T Labs

dilek@illinois.edu

Gokhan Tur

IEEE Fellow, Amazon Scholar

BS/MS/PhD Bilkent Univ

Past Affiliations: Amazon Alexa, Uber, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Apple, SRI, AT&T Labs

gokhan@illinois.edu

Postdocs

PhD Students

Emre Can Acikgoz

MS Koc University, BS Koc University

Research Interests: Conversational Agents, Large Language Models

Hobbies: Working Out

acikgoz2@illinois.edu

Ishika Agarwal

MS UIUC, BS Purdue

Research Interests: Reasoning, Reinforcement Learning, Active Learning

Hobbies: Guitar

ishikaa2@illinois.edu

Janvijay Singh

MS GaTech, BTech IIT Varanasi

Research Interests: Reasoning in LLMs, AI Applications for Societal Impact

Hobbies: Reading, Running, Croteching

jvsingh2@illinois.edu

Nimet Beyza Bozdag

BS University of Arizona

Past Affiliations: Microsoft

Research Interests: Conversational Agents and Persuasion, Multi-Agent Collaboration

Hobbies: Painting, Photography

nbozdag2@illinois.edu

Sagnik Mukherjee

BTech IIT Kanpur

Past Affiliations: Microsoft, Adobe

Research Interests: LLM Evaluation (evaluation of chain of thoughts), Multi Agent Collaboration with LLMs

sagnikm3@illinois.edu

Shuhaib Mehri

BS UBC

Past Affiliations: Amazon

Research Interests: Alignment, Instruction Tuning, Data Synthesis, Evaluation

mehri2@illinois.edu

Sumuk Shashidhar

Past Affiliations: HuggingFace, Rivian, Yahoo

sumuks2@illinois.edu

Pardis Sadat Zahraei

BS Sharif University of Technology

Research Interests: AI Safety and Alignment, Evaluation and Benchmarking of LLMs

zahraei2@illinois.edu

Takyoung Kim

MS Korea Univ., BS Sungkyunkwan Univ.

Past Affiliations: Amazon

Research Interests: Embodied & Spoken Dialogue

tk30@illinois.edu

Vardhan Dongre

MS UIUC, BTech MANIT Bhopal

Past Affiliations: Brunswick Corporation

Research Interests: Reasoning, MARL, Embodied AI

Hobbies: Digital Arts, Photography

vdongre2@illinois.edu

Masters Students

Yijyun Sun (Jenny)

BS NYCU

Hobbies: Basketball

yjsun2@illinois.edu

Alumni

Suvodip Dey


Role: postdoc