Steven Feng earns honourable mention for the 2020 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

has received one of two honourable mentions for the 2020 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Established 2012, the award is given annually to recognize research excellence of an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Mathematics.

photo of Steven Feng
Steven recently completed a Business Administration and Mathematics Double Degree, a five-year program that brings together the University of 蓝莓视频鈥檚 strength in mathematics with Wilfrid Laurier University鈥檚 expertise in business administration. Graduates of the program earn two degrees 鈥 a Bachelor of Mathematics from 蓝莓视频 and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Laurier.

鈥淵our two research supervisors, Professor Poupart and Professor Hoey, nominated you with their strongest support, noting that you are the most outstanding undergraduate research assistant they have ever worked with in terms of research skill, creativity and output, teamwork ability, motivation and work ethic,鈥 wrote Professor Anita T. Layton, Associate Dean of Research and International in the Faculty of Mathematics, in her letter to Steven.

Steven鈥檚 research with Professor Poupart on robust machine translation made important contributions both in terms of ideas and implementation of a new probabilistic embedding technique that can model various types of noise in casual text from social media and speech recognizers. After obtaining initial results, Steven made several suggestions to improve performance and to better understand which datasets the approach is most suitable for.

鈥淢r. Feng is fully engaged and contributes research ideas with a maturity and experience that is closer to that of a senior PhD student,鈥 wrote Professor Poupart in his nomination letter. 鈥淗e also has outstanding communication skills, both oral and written. He is engaging, clear and enthusiastic.鈥

Steven also conducted research with Professor Jesse Hoey to improve conversational assistants, which resulted in two publications. In the first project, he helped develop a system called ALOHA 鈥 short for Artificial Learning of Human Attributes 鈥 that can mimic human personality in dialogue. This work was published in a paper titled and was 听补迟 , a top international conference on artificial intelligence.

In the second project, Steven developed a task called semantic text exchange and a complementary system called SMERTI that uses natural language and emotional cues to change text depending on the situation in which it is used. Combined with ALOHA, this work will allow chatbots and conversational assistants to connect better to people with mental illness and cognitive disabilities.聽This research resulted in a first-author paper titled , which was presented at the .

These research projects with Professor Hoey also resulted in Steven receiving from the Computing Research Association an , an award that recognizes undergraduate students from universities across North America who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing science.

Steven will be starting graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in fall 2020 to further pursue his passion for machine learning and natural language processing research. His overall research goal is to work towards truly human-like conversational agents.

Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ming Li and his family established the Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in 2012 in honour of his late wife, Jessie Wenhui Zou.

Jessie was born August 27, 1968 in Wuhan, China. She received her PhD in physics from Wuhan University when she was 26 years old. She loved the field of finance and continued to pursue her studies and graduated from the University of 蓝莓视频鈥檚 statistical finance master鈥檚 program in 2000. Upon graduation, she worked at the Bank of Montreal, specializing in risk control management.

The Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research is valued at $1,000 and is presented annually to an undergraduate student enrolled in his or her final year of any program within the Faculty of Mathematics.

Past recipients