Wei Xu Named CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Challenge Winner

AI platform for data science and machine learning CrowdFlower announced on Wednesday the third round winners for its $1 million “AI for Everyone” Challenge. Assistant professor Wei Xu in Computer Science and Engineering is named one of the two winners. Her winning project, LanguageNet, will create multilingual data and enable deep learning techniques for cutting-edge natural language processing research. The other winning project is on studying hate speech by a team of researchers from multiple institutions, including Stanford and Cornell University. 

Wei Xu’s research group will leverage crowdsourcing and deep learning techniques to build a database of synonymous expressions. As long, complex ideas can be stated in a variety of ways, current natural language processing algorithms have a tough time understanding them. But building a corpus of synonymous phrases and meaning representations will be a big step forward for understanding the ever evolving human language. Wei and her team have made some great progress on their algorithms and methodology already. The problem? --- Deep learning algorithms are data hungry. The LanguageNet project will crowdsource human annotations for different languages at a large scale, through the help of CrowdFlower, and then train deep learning models to identify semantic relations. More about the story:https://www.crowdflower.com/announcing-q4-ai-everyone-winners/

The “AI for Everyone” Challenge was created by CrowdFlower to help advance cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence projects. The challenge is granting eight awards to companies, organizations or individuals using AI to solve critical problems. Selection is based on the innovation of the project, its importance to the advancement of AI and the overall potential impact of the proposed initiative.