UCSB Computer Science PhD student, Semih Yavuz, in Prof. Xifeng Yan's group received the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2018 Workshop titled "Conversational AI: Today's Practice and Tomorrow's Potential". This NeurIPS workshop focuses on conversational systems and natural language interfaces (such as Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Alexa) which have become commonplace in the span of only a few years. 

The Institute for Energy Efficiency announced this year’s Peter J. Frenkel Foundation fellows. This award is made possible through the generous support of The Peter J. Frenkel Foundation and is granted to two advanced doctoral candidates in recognition of their outstanding research contributions to the field of energy efficiency.

UCSB NLP Group receives a generous gift from Tencent AI Lab to work on "Cross-Lingual and Open-World Task-Oriented Dialogue Schema Induction and Generation". This builds on their previous Tencent AI Lab Rhino-Bird Gift Fund project "XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework", led by UCSB NLP Group PhD student Wenhu Chen. 
 

Professor Tevfik Bultan is the sole Principal Investigator of a recent
half million dollars, three year NSF grant titled "Differential Policy
Verification and Repair for Access Control in the Cloud."  Due to
the ubiquitous use of software services, protecting the confidentiality of
private information stored in compute clouds is becoming an increasingly
critical problem. Incorrect specification of access control policies in
cloud storage services can cause millions of customers' private data to be