Artificial Intelligence: The Past, Present and Future by Joy Zhang, Director @ Airbnb

​Dr. Joy Zhang is the Director of Engineering, leading the Intelligent Support Platform team at Airbnb, and formerly Head of AI Labs of Airbnb. He leads the effort of building AI technologies for future travel experiences as the master EM for the CSxAI program. 

​Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008 and joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University after graduation. He received 18 grants of total $22M from NSF, DARPA, Army Research Office, Northrop Grumman, Nokia, Google, Intel and Yahoo!. in the area of statistical natural language processing, mobile computing and user behavior modeling. In 2013, he joined Facebook following Facebook's acquisition of the startup company Jibbigo which Dr. Zhang was one of the founding members. Dr. Zhang built the machine translation team at Facebook and built the Natural Language Understanding team two years later. At Applied Machine Learning (AML), NLU team developed DeepText, a deep learning system for text understanding which is powering most Facebook's NLP features such as spam detection, suicide prevention, hate speech detection. From 2017 to 2018, he managed the Content Quality team of News Feed Integrity building ML systems to battle low quality content on Facebook such as click-bait, engagement-bait and fake new

​In this talk, Dr. Zhang will share insights from his extensive experience across academia, startups, and large tech companies, reflecting on his journey through roles as a graduate student, faculty member, software engineer, and now engineering director.