Gokhan Tur

Gokhan Tur is a Research Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. He is a leading expert in conversational AI systems, having contributed to major virtual assistants like Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. His research focuses on Large Language Models, Spoken Dialogue Systems, and Language Understanding. He holds over 250 publications and co-authored the influential book Spoken Language Understanding (Wiley, 2011).

Education: PhD in Computer Science from Bilkent University, Turkey (2000). Visiting scholarships at CMU LTI, Johns Hopkins University, and SRI International (1997-1999).

Research Contributions: Pioneered conversational systems at AT&T Research (2001-2006), worked on DARPA projects (GALE, CALO), and held key roles at Microsoft, Apple, Google, Uber, and Amazon. Current interests include LLMs and conversational AI evaluation frameworks like YourBench.

Awards: IEEE Fellow (2020), IEEE SPS Best Paper Award (2020), and multiple best paper recognitions from ISCA and EURASIP.

Labs & Teams: Leads the Conversational AI Lab at UIUC, collaborating with industry partners like Hugging Face. Advises PhD candidates specializing in NLP and ML.