I am a Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and Associate Professor in the School of Information and Department of Linguistics (Joint Appointment), and Computer Science (Associate Member), at The University of British Columbia. My research is in deep learning and natural language processing. My research program focuses on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pragmatics, with a goal to innovate more equitable, efficient, and ‘social’ machines for improved human health, safer social networking, and reduced information overload. Applications of my work currently span a wide range of speech and language understanding and generation tasks. For example, my group works on language models, automatic speech processing, machine translation, and computational socio-pragmatics in social media. I direct the UBC Deep Learning & NLP Group, co-direct the SSHRC-funded I Trust AI Partnership Grant, and co-lead the SSHRC Ensuring Full Literacy Partnership Grant. I am a founding member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Decision making and Action and a member of the Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems.