Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Dr. Dilek Hakkani-Tür is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Health Science. She holds affiliations with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science under the Grainger College of Engineering.

Education:

• BSc in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (1994)
• MSc and PhD in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University (1996–2000)

Research Interests: Dr. Hakkani-Tür specializes in Conversational AI, Natural Language/Speech Processing, Spoken Dialogue Systems, and Machine Learning. Her work focuses on knowledge-grounded large language models (LLMs), task-driven embodied agents, and dialogue systems integration with factual/subjective knowledge. Her contributions include foundational work on Alexa’s conversational bots and the Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge.

Key Achievements:

• Over 80 granted patents and 300+ peer-reviewed publications
• Editorial roles: Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2019–2021), co-Editor-in-Chief of Transactions of ACL
• Leadership: SIGDIAL President (2023–2025), NAACL Board member

Awards & Honors:

• ACL Fellow (2024), ISCA Fellow (2014), IEEE Fellow (2014)
• Best Paper Awards from IEEE Signal Processing Society, ISCA, and EURASIP
• IEEE Distinguished Industry Speaker (2021)

Teaching: Recently taught CS 598 DHT - Conversational AI. Collaborated on the YourBench evaluation framework paper (2025) with HuggingFace, advancing model benchmarking.