Honglei Liu

About me

Builders gonna build! I'm building Tofu, with a mission to revolutionize B2B Marketing with Generative AI. Previously, I worked as a Sr. Manager at Twitter and Head of Machine Learning and Data Platform at Fast. Before that, I was also a Research Scientist Manager at Facebook (now Meta) supporting a team that focuses on building Multimodal AI Assistant.

I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, under the supervision of Prof. Xifeng Yan. During my Ph.D Studies, I worked on various research projects on sequence mining, information extraction, active learning and deep learning. In general, my research was focused on developing better knowledge extraction tools for sequence data (e.g., biological sequences, event streams, text corpus). Before I started my Ph.D studies at UCSB, I also obtained B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University, China.

What's New

Publications

• NUANCED: Natural Utterance Annotation for Nuanced Conversation with Estimated Distributions
  Zhiyu Chen, Honglei Liu, Hu Xu, Seungwhan Moon, Hao Zhou, Bing Liu. Proc. of the Conf. on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021). [paper][data]
• Adding Chit-Chats to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues
  Kai Sun, Seungwhan Moon, Paul Crook, Stephen Roller, Becka Silvert, Bing Liu, Zhiguang Wang, Honglei Liu, Eunjoon Cho, Claire Cardie. Proc. of the Annual Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2021). [paper]
• User Memory Reasoning for Conversational Recommendation
  Hu Xu, Seungwhan Moon, Honglei Liu, Bing Liu, Pararth Shah, Bing Liu, Philip S. Yu. Proc. of Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020). [paper]
• Federated User Representation Learning
  Duc Bui, Kshitiz Malik, Jack Goetz, Honglei Liu, Seungwhan Moon, Anuj Kumar, Kang G. Shin. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.12535 (2019). [paper]
• Active Federated Learning
  Jack Goetz, Kshitiz Malik, Duc Bui, Seungwhan Moon, Honglei Liu, Anuj Kumar. Workshop on Federated Learning for Data Privacy and Confidentiality at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019). [paper]
• Global Textual Relation Embedding for Relational Understanding
  Zhiyu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Honglei Liu, Wenhu Chen, Xifeng Yan, Yu Su. Proc. of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019). (Short Paper) [paper]
• Explore-Exploit: A Framework for Interactive and Online Learning
  Honglei Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wenhai Yang, Benoit Dumoulin. Systems for Machine Learning Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018). [paper]
  Open-sourced as ReAgent , a modular, end-to-end platform for building reasoning systems
• PoQaa: Text Mining and Knowledge Sharing for Scientific Publications
  Keqian Li, Ping Zhang, Honglei Liu, Hanwen Zha, Xifeng Yan. Proc. of Int. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2018). (demo) [paper][video]
• In Vitro Validation of in Silico Identified Inhibitory Interactions
  Honglei Liu, Daniel Bridges, Connor Randall, Sara A. Solla, Bian Wu, Paul Hansma, Xifeng Yan, Kenneth S. Kosik, Kristofer Bouchard. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 321 (2019): 39-48. [paper]
• Global Relation Embedding for Relation Extraction
  Yu Su^*, Honglei Liu^*, Semih Yavuz, Izzeddin Gur, Huan Sun, Xifeng Yan. Proc. of the Annual Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2018). (*: Equal Contribution) [paper][source code]
• Active Learning of Functional Networks from Spike Trains
  Honglei Liu, Bian Wu. SIAM Int. Conf. on Data Mining (SDM 2017). [paper][supplementary materials][source code]
• Fast Motif Discovery in Short Sequences
  Honglei Liu, Fangqiu Han, Hongjun Zhou, Xifeng Yan, Kenneth S. Kosik. Proc. of Int. Conf. on Data Engineering (ICDE 2016). [paper] [slides] [poster] [software]
  Software licensed to SerImmune Inc. to produce real world value
• ALAE: Accelerating Local Alignment with Affine Gap Exactly in Biosequence Databases
  Xiaochun Yang, Honglei Liu, Bin Wang. Proc. of Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2012). [paper][source code]
• Approximate Substring Query Algorithms Supporting Local Optimal Matching
  Honglei Liu, Xiaochun Yang, Bin Wang, Rong Jin. Journal of Frontiers of Computer Science and Technology, 2011. [source code]

Open Source

Fun Stuff

Facebook Lunar New Year Gala

I was the organizer/director of the 2020 Facebook Lunar New Year Gala, which had 30+ volunteers, 150+ performers, 900+ guests and FB VP level speakers attended. We spent 4+ months in preparation for this. Every year, we organize this event so that our co-workers and their families can have a place to get together and celebrate lunar new year.

Shanghui Life

An iOS app that allows users to post, find and join events. Users can also invite friends to events, search nearby businesses, follow others, post texts and pictures, etc. I did all the coding for the backend.

Intelligent car

An intelligent car that can navigate by itself and follow a road track. I was in charge of the software part. We won the first prize in a national competition. Check more photos here.

Acoustic positioning car

A car that can locate its position by sending / receving sound wave signals and do a series of tasks. I was in charge of the software part. We won the second prize in a national competition with our design. Check more photos here.

I also did some other fun stuffs when I was an undergraduate student, including an animal behavior analysis system and a visualization software for Space Ad-hoc Networks.