York University

Lei Liu is a 4th-year Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University in Toronto where he is also a member and Research Assistant of the Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management Research Lab (IR lab) under the supervision of Prof. Jimmy Xiangji Huang. He has been a Teaching Assistant for several courses including Operating System Fundamentals, Computer Organization, Computer Use, etc. Lei’s research interests primarily lie in the area of dialogue systems with a focus on the multilingual/cross-lingual open-domain dialogue generation. From April to September 2021, Lei did a research intern in the Conversational AI (CoAI) Group at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China working with Prof. Minlie Huang. Prior to that, Lei completed his master’s degree from Central China Normal University (CCNU) in Wuhan, China where he was named Excellent Graduate Student and was the recipient of First Prize Graduate Scholarships, Graduate Public Welfare Award and Overseas Visiting Scholarship, etc.

Lei devoted himself to the computer science community by not only helping with conference organization but also serving as a Program Committee (PC) member or a reviewer of international conferences and/or journals in computer science. He was the Volunteer Leader of ACM SIGIR 2020 where he was mainly responsible for leading a team of 50 volunteers from 15 countries. Meanwhile, he was also the Web Master and Social Media Administrator of ACM SIGIR 2020. Moreover, Lei has been served as a PC member of several top-tier international conferences including ACM SIGIR Conference (2022, 2021 and 2020), EMNLP (2022) and EACL (2023). He was also a reviewer of some well-known international journals such as Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE) and Computational Intelligence (CI).

Lei joined various volunteer activities at labor unions, volunteer teaching programs and graduate student unions/associations. He was the CUPE 3903 Ways and Means Fund Committee member, CUPE 3903 EECS Department Steward and York University EECS-GSA Executive Committee member in the 2021-2022 academic year at York University. In the year of 2017, he participated in the ‘8th Hoping Download’ launched by National Taiwan Normal University and the ‘Sunlight Volunteer Teaching’ launched by CCNU in Summer 2017 where he was the Questionnaire Group Leader of CCNU Volunteer Teaching Team in both programs. From September 2016 to June 2017, he served as the Deputy Minister of News Editor Sector for the 27th Central China Normal University Graduate Student Union (CCNU-GSU).