bio

Hongyuan Mei is currently a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). His research spans machine learning and natural language processing. Currently, he is most interested in

• developing neural and neuro-symbolic models for time series;
• harnessing and improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models;
• building world models that learn from real-world interactions.

His research has been supported by a Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship, the 2020 JHU Jelinek Memorial Award, and research gifts from Adobe and Ant Group. His technical innovations have been integrated into real-world products such as Alipay, the world’s largest mobile digital payment platform, which serves more than one billion users. His research has been covered by Fortune Magazine and Tech At Bloomberg.

Hongyuan Mei obtained his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), where he was advised by Jason Eisner. He was a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP). At JHU, he collaborated with Yanxun Xu from Applied Math & Statistics as well as Benjamin Van Durme and Kevin Duh from Computer Science.

Before joining JHU and CLSP, Hongyuan Mei obtained two MS degrees from University of Chicago, and did research in natural language processing with Mohit Bansal and Matthew R. Walter at TTIC. Prior to that, he obtained a BE in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Finance from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.