Julia Rayz

Julia Rayz is a Professor and Associate Department Head in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University's Purdue Polytechnic Institute. She specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Representation. Her work focuses on enabling informal human-computer communication, with a particular interest in computational humor detection and uncertainty management.

Education:

• PhD, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Cincinnati, 2008
• MS, Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, 2004
• BA, Mathematics, University of Cincinnati, 1999
• BS, Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, 1999

Research Interests:

• Natural language understanding
• Knowledge representation and reasoning
• Cognitive science
• Phishing detection
• Online predation analysis

Recent grants include the TaskBot Challenge Competition (2023), SaTC-EDU AI-based Social Engineering Training (2021), and collaborative research on Robots and Sensors for Human Well-being. She leads the Applied Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding Lab, advancing projects in smart home energy systems, chatbot reliability, and ethical AI.