Zhou Yu

Zhou Yu designs algorithms for real-time intelligent interactive systems that coordinate with user actions that are beyond spoken languages, including non-verbal behaviors to achieve effective and natural communications. In particular, she optimizes human-machine communication via studies of multimodal sensing and analysis, speech and natural language processing, machine learning and human-computer interaction. The central focus of her research is to bring together all the areas above to design, implement and deploy end-to-end real-time interactive intelligent systems that are able to plan globally considering interaction history and current user actions to achieve better user experience and task performance. She enjoys collaborating with researchers with different backgrounds on interdisciplinary research in all areas of science, such as health care, education and robotics.

Yu joined Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in Jan 2021. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at UC Davis. She received her PhD at the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University 2017.