Gerard de Melo

Position:
Professor, Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems
Hasso Plattner Institute / University of Potsdam
Potsdam, Germany

Secondary:
Visiting Professor at Rutgers University — New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Contact:
Hasso Plattner Institute
Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße 187
D-14482 Potsdam
Germany

@
gdm
demelo.org
(PGP public encryption key, alt.)

@
gerard.demelo
hpi.de

@
gerard.demelo
hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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Pronouns: he/him

News

I have accepted a tenured Full Professor position at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam (Chair for AI and Intelligent Systems). We are looking for doctoral candidates, post-docs, visiting professors (spend your sabbatical in Berlin!). For many years now, the HPI has had the top-ranked CS program in Germany in the main national academic ranking (CHE). More information...
Many thanks to Google for their Google Cloud Platform credits for Rajarshi Bhowmik's work on fact-based summarization.
Many thanks to J.P. Morgan for funding my PhD advisee Xin Dong as a J.P. Morgan PhD Fellow.
Many thanks to Diffbot for their grant to support Rajarshi Bhowmik's work on deep learning models for entities.
Gave a well-received Tutorial on Word, Sentence, and Document Embedding Methods at AAAI 2019. The slides are available online.
Many thanks to Adobe for an unrestricted gift, for our research on cross-lingual representation.
Many thanks to the Hasso-Plattner-Institut for providing compute infrastructure for our research on representation learning services.
Very humbled to receive the Rutgers CSGSS Best Professor Award, along with Yongfeng Zhang, in the Teaching, Advising, and Overall categories. At this point, I am not really sure I deserve this award, but I will consider this an additional reason to work hard and live up to the award in the future.
Congratulations to Tugba Kulahcioglu for her Nomination for Best Paper at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, Laguna Hills, CA, 2018.
I am happy to be serving as PC Co-Chair for the Language, Data and Knowledge conference (LDK 2019), together with Maria Eskevich. Also, I am co-organizing the Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Technologies (DL4KGS) at ESWC 2018 and serving as Workshop Co-Chair for the 13th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2019).
Acknowledged as Distinguished Senior PC Member for IJCAI 2018 and as Outstanding Reviewer for NAACL-HLT 2018.
Congratulations to Xiang Long for winning the ActivityNet 2017 Kinetics challenge! Find out more about the details of the approach in our CVPR paper.
Congratulations to Xiang Long for winning the 3rd Prize ($20,000) in the Google Cloud & YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge! Find out more about the details of the approach in our AAAI 2018 paper.
Our deep neural information retrieval model PACRR was the backbone for the top-ranked TREC 2017 Complex Answer Retrieval submissions!
Congratulations to Qian Yang for receiving a Google Women Techmakers Scholarship!
Just found out that Google Translate is using our OpenWN-PT project. Great to see our work contributing to helping people understand each other.
Dear Students: Please contact me if you are interested in research projects related to web mining, natural language processing, or machine learning!

Curriculum Vitae

From 2017 to 2020, I was an Assistant Professor heading the Deep Data Lab at Rutgers University.
From 2013 to 2016, I was an Assistant Professor heading the Web Mining and Language Technology group at Tsinghua University, which is generally considered mainland China's #1 Science & Engineering university, and ranks 1st in the world in the U.S. News & World Report Computer Science ranking (2020), 8th in the world on CSRankings.org (as of 2020-06), 14th in the world in the Times Higher Education World University Reputation Ranking 2019, and 15th in the world in the QS World University Ranking (2021). This was as part of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, which is led by Turing award winner Andrew Yao and conducts interdisciplinary computer science and quantum computing research.
Before that, I spent two years as a post-doctoral research scholar at UC Berkeley working in the AI/FrameNet group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). I also spent 4 months at the Machine Learning and Perception Group (headed by Christopher Bishop) at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working with Thore Graepel and Gjergji Kasneci.
Prior to that, I was a member of the Databases and Information Systems Group headed by Gerhard Weikum at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, receiving my doctoral degree from Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany in 2010.

Team and Research Foci

I am leading the Deep Data Lab, which currently consists of 7 PhD students, plus a few master's students and undergraduates. We conduct interdisciplinary research in computer science and beyond. The vision driving this research is the idea that there is now so much digital data out there that machines ought to be able to learn to guide us in almost every aspect of our daily life, e.g. by addressing our information needs and helping us make more informed decisions. This, however, requires novel algorithms that simultaneously learn and integrate information from multiple heterogeneous data sources in order to make sense of human language and more generally of the world.

More specifically, my research interests include:

Data Mining, Graph Algorithms, and Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing
Big Data Approaches to Web and Text Mining
Data Integration, Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Technologies, Information Retrieval
Multilingual and cross-lingual natural language processing

Join us!

Get in touch with me if you are seeking PhD or Post-Doc opportunities at one of the top universities for computer science research, located in the Greater New York region, which is currently one of the most exciting areas for artificial intelligence and data science in the world.
More details.

Grants, Awards, and Recognition

Awards

Rutgers Computer Science Graduate Student Society's Best Professor Award, along with Yongfeng Zhang
in the Teaching, Advising, and Overall categories, 2017–2018
Best Paper Award (out of 945 full paper submissions)
19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010) [certificate]
Best Paper Award
International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources (ICGL 2008) [picture]
Best Paper Award
NAACL 2015 Workshop on Vector Space Modeling for NLP (sponsored by Google DeepMind and TextKernel)
Best Paper Honorable Mention
52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014)
Best Student Paper Nominee (top 3)
ESWC 2015
Best Paper Nominee (with Tugba Kulahcioglu)
12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, Laguna Hills, CA, 2018
Best Demonstration Award (with Johannes Hoffart, Fabian Suchanek, Klaus Berberich, Edwin Lewis-Kelham, Gerhard Weikum)
20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011)
Nominee for Best German/Swiss/Austrian Computer Science Dissertation 2010 (GI-Dissertationspreis 2010)
Dr. Eduard Martin Prize
awarded for best Saarland University dissertations across all disciplines
Distinguished Senior PC Member
IJCAI 2018
Outstanding Reviewer
NAACL-HLT 2018
Best Reviewer Award
PIKM 2012 (5th Workshop for Ph.D. Students at ACM CIKM 2012) [certificate]

Research Grants and Scholarships

Google, Google Cloud Platform credits: 2020
P.I. (joint work with Rajarshi Bhowmik)
Hasso-Plattner-Institut Future SOC Lab, Computing Resources: 2018/9
P.I.
Adobe, Unrestricted Gift: 2018/9
P.I.
DARPA Grant: 2017--
Co-P.I., SocialSim program ($2,029,752)
Samsung Research Grant: 2016/7
P.I. (with Samsung Co-P.I.)
National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant: 2016
P.I., Grant #61550110504
Microsoft Research Visiting Researcher Program: 2014
Microsoft Research Asia-funded collaboration
National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant: 2014-2015
P.I., Grant #61450110088
Post-Doctoral Research Grant: 2011-2013
DAAD
Scholarship (Doctoral Studies): 2007-2010
IMPRS-CS
Scholarship (Foreign Studies): 2004-2005, Université de Montréal, Canada
German Academic Scholarship Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
Scholarship (Merit): 2003-2006
German Academic Scholarship Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
Scholarship (Online Scholarship): alumnus
e-fellows.net

Projects and Downloads

Universal Wordnet (UWN)

One of the largest multilingual knowledge graphs, transforming the well-known WordNet database into a massively multilingual resource covering over 1 million words and several million named entities in a single semantically organized hierarchy. Our derivative project OpenWN-PT is being used by Google Translate.

Lexvo.org

Contributes information about words and other language-related entities to the Linked Data Web and Semantic Web, leading to a Web of Data in which the British Library, the Spanish National Library, and others have linked their data to Lexvo.org, and Lexvo.org in turn connects its own data to other valuable resources.

Sentiment/Emotion

Datasets and resources for sentiment analysis and fine-grained emotion analysis, in part available for multiple languages.

YAGO-SUMO Integration

An ontology providing an enormous body of axiomatized world knowledge based on YAGO as well as the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). YAGO was used in IBM's famous Jeopardy!-winning system Watson.

Etymological Wordnet