I'm Yanchao Yu.
I'm a Lecturer (Assistant Professor).
Edinburgh Napier University
About Me
I am currently working as a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, focusing on Dialogue Systems, Multi-modal Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction. My principal research interests lie in Human-Robot interaction through daily, spontaneous conversation in Natural Language, mainly focusing on Visual Language Grounding, for example, multi-modal learning/tutoring conversations. On the other hand, my interests also lie in a wide range of state-of-the-art technologies (e.g. neural network) to solve realistic problems, for example, incremental dialogue system, multi-party conversations and open-domain social conversations.
Contact Details
Yanchao Yu
Edinburgh Napier University
10 Colinton Road
Edinburgh , EH10 5DT
(+44) 07521521986
y.yu@napier.ac.uk
Education
Heriot-Watt Unviersity, UK
PhD in Artificial Intelligence •November 2018
Ph.D thesis : Optimising Strategies for Learning Visually-grounded Word Meanings Through Interaction
Heriot-Watt Unviersity, UK
MSc in Software Engineering (Distinction) •November 2013
Graduation Project : Siri 2 : Conversational Speech Interfaces on Mobile Devices
Beijing Information Science & Technology University, China
BSc in Computer Science and Technology •July 2011
Graduation Project : Online Examination System using Pattern Recognition
Work
Edinbrgh Napier Univeristy, UK
Lecturer• August 2021 - Present
Heriot-Watt Unviersity, UK
Research Associate• March 2020 - July 2021
AlanaAI, UK
NLP Researcher & Software Engineer• June 2020 - July 2021
Voysis, UK
Dialogue Modelling Scientist• May 2018 - March 2020
Heriot-Watt Unviersity, UK
Research Assistant | Associate• October 2013 - May 2018
Beijing Hengxin Yongtai Technology Development CO., LTD, China
Cisco Network Engineer (Internship)• January 2009 - April 2009
Institute of Geology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Science, China
C# Software Developer (Part-time)• Jun 2008 - December 2008
Project
SPRING
EU H2020-ICT• Research Associate • March 2020 - July 2021
Description: A three-year research project that designs and builds a conversational AI for human- robot interaction in healthcare
Voysis Project
Voysis UK Ltd.• Research Associate • November 2017 - May 2018
Description: An industry-driven research project aims at designing and building an agenda-based user simulation and a conversational agent in the e-commerce domain.
Amazon Challenge 2017
Amazon• Research Associate | PhD • January 2017 - November 2017
Description: A competition student project aims to design and build a social open-domain conversation agent, i.e. interacting and being evaluated with the general public.
Babble
EPSRC• Research Associate | PhD • April 2015 - November 2017
Description: A research project that aims to explore/design the foundations and impetus for the rapid development of naturally interactive conversational interfaces with deep language understanding in various of areas.
SpeechCity
EPSRC• Research Assistant • March 2014 - October 2014
Description: A research project that aims to build an adaptive spoken interaction for an intelligent city guide
Parlance
FP7 EC-funded• Research Assistant • October 2013 - February 2015
Description: A research project aims at designing and building a mobile application that ap- proaches human performance in conversational interaction.
Research Interests
Invited Talks
Visual Language Grounding through Natural Language Conversation
MediaTeK ltd, UK •October 2020
VOILA : An Optimised Dialogue System for Interactively Learning Visually-Grounded Words Meaning
Voysis ltd., Ireland •August 2017
Learning how to learn : an adaptive dialogue agent for incrementally learning visually grounded word meaning
Mulubaa, Canana •June 2017
Teaching
SET08119 Object Oriented Software Development
• https://www.modules.napier.ac.uk/Module.aspx?ID=SET08119&Letter=set08119
Check Out Some of My Works.
Interactive Teachable System -- First Toy System (Hand-crafted Dialogue System using the Interactive Multimodal Framework)
Socially Conversational Agent for Elderly Healthcare (Demo)
Parlance - Conversational Restaurant Booking System (in English)
Parlance - Conversational Restaurant Booking System (in Spanish)
Parlance - Conversational Restaurant Booking System (in Mandarin)
Incrementally learning semantic attributes through dialogue interaction
Human-Human Dialogue Collection on the Visual-Attribute Learning Task using DiET (a text-based character-by-character incremental dialogue experimental toolkit)