Ian Lane

Ian Lane is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz's Baskin Engineering school, serving as Program Director for the Natural Language Processing Professional Master's Degree Program. He joined UCSC in Fall 2022 after an extensive career spanning academia and industry.

His research centers on computational systems that understand spoken human language, spanning speech recognition, transcription, meaning interpretation, and contextually appropriate responses. Key research areas include:

• Natural Language Processing for real-world applications
• Conversational AI systems development
• Speech-to-speech translation technologies
• Multimodal interaction (audio-visual integration)
• Language technologies that learn through real-world interaction

His recent publications demonstrate strong focus on hallucination detection in LLMs, tabular data understanding, explainable AI, and robust speech recognition systems. Current work emphasizes "in the wild" language technologies that adapt through user interaction.

Dr. Lane has received recognition through impactful industry applications including Jibbigo (the first mobile speech translation app) and military translation systems deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He actively mentors students and collaborates across UCSC's Silicon Valley Campus programs including Games and Playable Media and Human-Computer Interaction. His vision includes integrating NLP with virtual environments for language learning and skill acquisition.