UCSB CS Prof. William Wang has received a Rhino-Bird Gift Fund from Tencent AI Lab to work on dialogue systems. The main purpose of the fund is to encourage and support eminent or brilliant scholars specialized in cutting-edge researches of AI (including but not limited to machine learning, computer vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing). The award is highly competitive and recognizes the quality of research and its importance to the industry. In this project, Prof. Wang and his team will design novel machine learning algorithms to model the long-range dynamics in a task-oriented dialogue system.

About Tencent and Tencent AI Lab: Tencent's market cap is at 464.3 billion USD, and it was among the top-5 Internet companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent) in 2016.
This year, Tencent is establishing an AI research lab in Seattle, demonstrating a growing determination to master a technology that looks set to define the future of many industries.