I am a second-year Ph.D. student (2016-) in Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing, where I am currently advised by Benjamin Van Durme and Jason Eisner.

My research interests are rooted in designing models and algorithms to solve challenging problems in the field of natural language processing. I am currently working on continuous-time sequential modelling (e.g., neural Hawkes process).

Befor joining CLSP-JHU, I obtained a M.S. in Physical Science at The University of Chicago, and did research in natural language understanding and generation with Professor Mohit Bansal and Professor Matthew R. Walter at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Prior to that, I obtained a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

I believe that great research stems from curiosity.

Quote from David Blackwell: "I've worked in so many areas – I'm sort of a dilettante. Basically, I'm not interested in doing research and I never have been. I'm interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it."

Some current and past research projects that I have been working on:

• The Neural Hawkes Process: A Neurally Self-Modulating Multivariate Point Process
  Hongyuan Mei, Jason Eisner
  arXiv [pdf][bib]

• Coherent Dialogue with Attention-based Language Models
  Hongyuan Mei, Mohit Bansal, Matthew R. Walter
  Proceedings of AAAI 2017, San Francisco, California. [pdf][bib]

• What to talk about and how? Selective Generation using LSTMs with Coarse-to-Fine Alignment
  Hongyuan Mei, Mohit Bansal, Matthew R. Walter
  Proceedings of NAACL 2016, San Diego, California. [pdf][bib]

• Listen, Attend, and Walk: Neural Mapping of Navigational Instructions to Action Sequences
  Hongyuan Mei, Mohit Bansal, Matthew R. Walter
  Proceedings of AAAI 2016, Phoenix, Arizona. [pdf][bib]
  Selected Oral with NVIDIA Award (TITAN X GPU Prize) in NIPS 2015 Multimodal Machine Learning workshop
  

• Accurate Vision-based Vehicle Localization using Satellite Imagery
  Hang Chu, Hongyuan Mei, Mohit Bansal, Matthew R. Walter
  Presented at NIPS 2015 Transfer and Multi-Task Learning workshop. [pdf][bib]

Quote from David Goldstein: "Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, "Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics." Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it."

Some current and past courses that I have been involved in:

• Teaching Assistant, 600.465---Natural Language Processing (Instructor: Jason Eisner), Johns Hopkins University, Fall 2017
• Guest Lecturer, 600.466---Information Retrieval and Web Agents (Instructor: David Yarowsky), Johns Hopkins University, Spring 2017

• Reviewers for: ACL-2017, ICLR-2017
• Programme committee members for: ACL-RoboNLP-2017, AAAI-NCHRC-2017

When I am away from my workstation, I may be:

• Playing Texas Hold'em or other card games
• Playing billiard or snooker
• Hiking or skiing
• Reading (mostly likely history) books
• Drawing (mostly likely skeching)