Weiyan Shi
(she/her)
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary with the College of Engineering
Research interests
- Artificial intelligence
- Dialogue systems
- Human–computer interaction
- Machine learning
- Natural language processing
- Persuasion, negotiation, and social influence
- Security and privacy
Education
- PhD in Computer Science, Columbia University
- MS in Statistics, UC Berkeley
- BS in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Renmin University of China
Biography
Weiyan Shi is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, based in Boston.
Shi previously worked as a research intern at Meta AI Research, where she developed the negotiation dialogue agent that allowed the AI agent Cicero to play the game of Diplomacy at a human level. This work received significant media attention, including from The New York Times, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, and Forbes. Shi also worked as a data scientist in the San Francisco Bay Area for two years developing chatbots for customer service. She was recognized as a Rising Star in Machine Learning by the University of Maryland, and her work on personalized persuasive dialogue systems was nominated for a best paper award at ACL 2019.
Before joining Khoury College full time in 2024, Shi spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher in Stanford’s Natural Language Processing Group. She is interested in NLP in the context of social influence dialogue systems such as persuasion, negotiation, and recommendation, as well as privacy-preserving NLP applications. Shi is excited to collaborate with her Khoury colleagues on the development and study of secure, private, equitable, and expert AI models.
In her free time, Shi enjoys watching movies and TV series, traveling, and trying great food.
