Talk videos can be found here at bilibili; Chinese blogs here at zhihu; Code here at github; News here Follow @ZhijianOu
GENERAL INFORMATION
| 2008.12 - | Associate professor. |
| 2014.08 - 2015.07 | Visiting Scholar, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
| 2003.08 - 2008.12 | Assistant professor, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. |
| 1998.09 - 2003.07 | Ph.D. in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. |
| 1994.09 - 1998.07 | B.S. with the highest honor in electronic engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China. |
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Speech and Language Processing (speech recognition and dialogs, natural language processing)
- Statistical Machine Intelligence (particularly with probabilistic graphical models and deep learning)
I'm broadly interested in Dealing with Uncertainty for Intelligent Systems. The two fundamental problems are first to construct probabilistic models of the studied phenomenon using human knowledge and machine learning algorithms, and second to find efficient ways of implementing probabilistic inference with those models. Graphical models have emerged as a general framework for describing and applying probabilistic models, while the core is probability theory and mathematical statistics.
Current interests are Speech and Language Processing, by proposing new models of speech and language, developing new methods for learning and inference with those models, and applying them to real tasks in speech and language processing. 100,000 years ago, humans started to speak so they could free up their hands. Is it going to happen again? Getting rid of keyboards and talking to machines is not a dream in the near future, I believe. Moreover, efficient searching, mining, and browsering the large amounts of digital media, in which speech is often an indispensable component, also needs speech signal and information processing techniques.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
TEACHING
- Theory and Applications of Probabilistic Graphical Models, since 2004 Fall.
- Probability and Stochastic Processes (1), since 2012 Spring.
- Probability and Stochastic Processes (2), since 2012 Fall.
- Mathematics and engineering applications, 2005 Spring - 2011 Spring.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
- IEEE Senior Member (2014-present)
- Associate Editor (5/2019-5/2024), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (T-ASLP)
- Editorial Board Member (11/2021-11/2024), Computer Speech and Language
- Chair of Workshops Sub-Committee (since 2022) and Committee Member (2020 - 2022, 2023 - 2025), IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC)
- Committee Member (2019 - present), APSIPA Machine Learning and Data Analytics (MLDA) Technical Committee
- Distinguished Member (2022-present), China Computer Federation (CCF)
- Committee Member (2018-present), CCF Speech Conversation and Auditory Technical Committee
- Steering Committee Member (2017-present), National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication (NCMMSC)
- Conference Organizing Committee Member:
INTERSPEECH 2020 Tutorial Chair; SLT 2021 General Chair; ASRU 2021 SPS Liaison; SLT 2022 SPS Liaison; EMNLP 2022 SereTOD Workshop General Chair. - Conference Senior Program Committee member/Area Chair/Meta reviewer:
ICASSP; IJCAI; EMNLP; SLT. - Conference Session Chair:
ICASSP; INTERSPEECH; ASRU; ISCSLP. - Conference Technical Program Committee Member/Scientific Committee Member/Reviewer:
NeurIPS; ICLR; ICML; AAAI; IJCAI; ACL; EMNLP; ACL Rolling Review; ICASSP; INTERSPEECH; MLSP; IWAENC; ISCSLP; NAACL-HLT; CHiME; HSCMA; DSLW. - Journal Reviewer:
T-ASLP; T-SMC; JMLR; SPL; Science China; Chinese Journal of Electronics; Acta Automatic Sinica; Journal of Computer Science and Technology; Journal of Chinese Information Processing. - Tutorial Speaker:
ISCSLP 2016, 2018; ACPR 2021; ICASSP 2022.
HONORS
- China Guangxi Provincial Science and Technology Award, 2022.
- Media Artificial Intelligence Application Innovation National Competition, First-class Prize, 2021.
- Advisor, Beijing Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis for "Mixed-feature Random Field Language Models with Applications to Speech Recognition", by Silin Gao, 2020.
- Advisor, ISCSLP (International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing) Best Student Paper for "Angular Softmax Loss for End-to-end Speaker Verification", by Yutian Li, Feng Gao, Zhijian Ou, and Jiasong Sun, 2018.
- Advisor, Tsinghua University Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis for "Statistical Language Models Based on Trans-dimensional Random Fields", by Bin Wang, 2018.
- China NRTA Science and Technology Innovation Award, 2012.
- Tsinghua University Young Teachers Teaching Contest First-class Prize, 2012.
- Prize for Mentoring Tsinghua University Outstanding Undergraduate Class, 2010.
- Prize for Mentoring Tsinghua University Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.
- Prize for Mentoring Tsinghua University Outstanding Student Research Training (SRT) Project, 2005, 2012.
- NCMMSC (National Conference on Man Machine Speech Communication) Best Paper for "Application of maximum likelihood linear regression to linear prediction HMMs", by Jinyin Wang, Zuoying Wang, and Zhijian Ou, 2005.
- Win the best result for Chinese syllable recognition in the 863 evaluation in 2003.
- Best Paper Award in the Ph.D. Student Academic Forum, Department of EE, Tsinghua University, 2002.