Dilek Hakkani-Tür (F) is a senior principal scientist at Amazon Alexa AI and a Visiting Distinguished Professor at UC Santa Cruz, focusing on enabling natural dialogues with machines. Prior to joining Amazon, she was leading the dialogue research group at Google (2016-2018), a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (2010-2016), International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, 2006-2010) and AT&T Labs-Research (2001-2005). She received her BSc degree from Middle East Technical Univ, in 1994, and MSc and PhD degrees from Bilkent University, Department of Computer Engineering, in 1996 and 2000, respectively.

Dr. Hakkani-Tür is the recipient of three best paper awards for her work on active learning for dialogue systems, from IEEE Signal Processing Society (2008), International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) (2007) and European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) (2007). She served as Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2005-2008), Member, IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2009-2014), Area Editor for speech and language processing for Elsevier’s Digital Signal Processing Journal and IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2011-2013), and served on the ISCA Advisory Council (2015-2018). She is Editor-in-Chief, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2019-2021), and a Fellow of the IEEE (2014) and ISCA (2014).

Dr. Hakkani-Tür’s research interests include conversational AI, natural language and speech processing, spoken dialogue systems, and machine learning for language processing.