Chia-ying Jackie Lee Ph.D. in Computer Science Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology email: chiaying at csail.mit.edu

About me

I focus on developing machine learning, AI driven systems.

• I co-founded Silo for the mission of making the agricultural supply chain transparent, efficient, and sustainable. During my time at Silo, I hired, built, and led the entire engineering team to develop the core product from scratch. In addition to leading the technical part of the company, I also participated heavily in product and bussiness decisions. I left the company after it successfully raised series A from Andreessen Horowitz.
• Previously, I worked at Virta Health as the first data scientist. I applied deep learning and other machine learning methods to improve healthcare outcome and efficiency. Virta is a deeply mission-driven company, and that had a profound impact on how I hope to build Silo.
• I was also part of Kite. I built several core fuctions of the artificial programming copilot including program language detection, related code examples, diff suggestions (among others). Kite has a stellar engineering team.

Previous Life

I've successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis.

I was a graduate student working with Dr. James Glass at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) of MIT. I applied machine learning techniques to let computers discover linguistic knowledge of a language from a large amount of speech data.

I've spent years studying machine learning, statistical inference, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational cognitive science. I enjoy building probabilistic models to gain useful knowledge from a massive amount of data.

Besides building probabilistic models and deriving inference algorithms, I also have hands-on experiences in deep learning (I implemented a library in C++ for constructing various neural nets, with a focus on recurrent neural nets, during one of my summer internships before any of the current deep learning libraries became available). I have also worked on HMM-based speech synthesis and statistical machine translation.

Last but not least, I genuinely enjoy the process of looking for problems, brainstorming for innovative solutions, and implementing them.

Resume/CV

Here's my CV. [pdf]

Press

• MIT News Learning spoken language

Google Schoar

• Google scholar page

Thesis

• Discovering Linguistic Structures in Speech: Models and Applications (Nominated for the Best Doctoral Thesis Award in CS, MIT 2014)
  Chia-ying Lee.
  Ph.D. Thesis, CSAIL MIT, July 2014.
  [bibtex][pdf][slides][coded in C++]

Publications

• Improving Hemoglobin A1c Prediction by Leveraging Participant Similarity
  Chia-ying Lee, Amy McKenzie, David Bill
  Workshop on Machine Learning for Health, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2016.
• Unsupervised Lexicon Discovery from Acoustic Input
  Chia-ying Lee, Timothy O'Donnell, James Glass
  Transactions of Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2015.
  [bibtex][pdf][Coded in C++][Github]
• One-shot Learning of Generative Speech Concepts
  Brenden Lake*, Chia-ying Lee*, James Glass, Joshua Tenenbaum
  Cognitive Science Soceity (CogSci), 2014.
  [bibtex][pdf][slides][Coded in C++][Github]
• Joint Learning of Phonetic Units and Word Pronunciations for ASR
  Chia-ying Lee, Yu Zhang and James Glass.
  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2013.
  [bibtex][pdf][slides][Coded in C++][Github]
• A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Acoustic Model Discovery (Highlighted in SLTC Newsletter, August 2012)
  Chia-ying Lee and James Glass.
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2012.
  [bibtex][pdf][slides][Coded in C++][Github]
• A Transcription Task for Crowdsourcing with Automatic Quality Control
  Chia-ying Lee and James Glass.
  International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), 2011.
  [bibtex][pdf][coded in JavaScript]
• An Efferent-Inspired Auditory Model Front-End for Speech Recognition
  Chia-ying Lee, James Glass and Oded Ghitza.
  International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), 2011.
  [bibtex][pdf][slides][coded in Matlab]
• Collecting Voices from the Cloud
  Ian McGraw, Chia-ying Lee, Lee Hetherington, Stephanie Seneff, Jim Glass.
  The Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 2010.
  [bibtex][pdf][coded in JavaScript]
• Closed-loop Auditory-based Representation for Robust Speech Recognition
  Chia-ying Lee.
  Master Thesis, CSAIL MIT, May 2010.
  [bibtex][pdf][coded in Matlab]
• Empirical Mode Decomposition Descriptor for Plane Closed Curves
  Soo-Chang Pei, Yu-Zhe Hsiao and Chia-Ying Lee.
  IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2009.
  [bibtex][pdf][coded in Matlab]

Invited Talks

• A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Acoustic Model Discovery
  Johns Hopkins University, April 2012.
• A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Acoustic Model Discovery
  SLS Seminar, CSAIL MIT, May 2012.
• Zero-Resource Speech Pattern and Sub-Word Unit Discovery (Highlighted in SLTC Newsletter, November 2012)
  The Speech and Audio in the Northeast (SANE) Conference, October 2012.
• Bayesian Approaches to Acoustic Model and Pronunciation Lexicon Discovery
  NL Seminar, Information Science Institute (ISI), University of Southern California (USC), July 2013.
• Unsupervised Bayesian Approach to Training Automatic Speech Recognizers
  Natural Language Processing Group, CSAIL, MIT, October 2013.
• Discovering Linguistic Structures from Speech: Models and Applications
  International Computer Science Institute, University of California, Berkeley, November 2015.
• Discovering Linguistic Structures from Speech: Models and Applications
  SRI International, January 2016.
• Machine Learning in Healthcare
  Virta, August 2017.

Professional Services

• Program Committee, EACL 2021
• Program Committee, NAACL 2020
• Program Committee, NAACL 2020
• Program Committee, EMNLP 2018
• Program Committee, Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2018
• Area Chair, Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2017
• Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
• Reviewer, IEEE Signal Processing Letters
• Reviewer, Journal of Neural Computation
• Reviewer, International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence

Teaching

• Spring 2011 6.034 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (TA)
• Summer 2011 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Project, CSAIL, MIT (Mentor)
• Spring 2010 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Project, CSAIL, MIT (Mentor)

Beyond research

I run, I dance and I take photos.

I participated in quite a few student organizations at MIT. To name just a few, I was a member and the president of the CSAIL Student Committee, the co-president of Graduate Women in Course 6 (GW6), and the chief organizer of CSAIL Student Workshop (CSW) 2009.