Dani Yogatama

Dani Yogatama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and cofounder/CEO of Reka. Previously, he served as a senior staff research scientist at DeepMind (2016-2022) and worked at Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab (2015-2016).

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2010-2015), advised by Noah Smith
• Monbukagakusho Fellow, University of Tokyo (2008-2010)
• Bachelor's degree, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia

Research Interests: Dani's work centers on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with significant contributions to language understanding systems. His research bridges theoretical foundations and practical AI applications, evidenced by leadership roles in top-tier conferences. He maintains active collaborations across global institutions while advancing core NLP methodologies through both academic and industrial channels.

Scientific Awards:

• Monbukagakusho Fellowship from Japan's Ministry of Education

Advising: Dani currently supervises five USC PhD students: Ting-Rui Chiang, Ollie Liu, Joshua Robinson, Isabelle Lee, and Velocity Yu. His mentorship extends to numerous interns including Yixuan Su (Cambridge), Paul Pu Liang (CMU), Paul Michel (CMU), Qi Liu (Oxford), Devendra Sachan (MILA/McGill), Hao Peng (Washington), Mikel Artetxe (Basque Country), Jean Maillard (Cambridge), and Yishu Miao (Oxford) during his DeepMind tenure.

Labs and Teams: He cofounded Reka, an AI company, and previously contributed to Noah's ARK at Carnegie Mellon and Tanaka-Ishii's Lab at the University of Tokyo. His conference service includes area chair roles for NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, and ICLR between 2020-2023.