Monday, July 6, 2026 Session 12: Discussion Panel - 14:45 - Harbor Ballroom Level 2

Panel: Explainability of LLMs: Academic vs Industry perspective

Panelists

Tal Linzen Tal Linzen
NYU/Google

Sameer Singh Sameer Singh
UCI/Spiffy AI

Kamalika Das Kamalika Das
Intuit

Moderator

Julian McAuley Julian McAuley
UC San Diego

Monday, July 6, 2026 Session: Careers in NLP - 9:00 - 10:00 AM - Balboa

Panel: Careers in NLP

Panelists

Roberto Navigli Roberto Navigli
Professor, Sapienza University of Rome & Scientific Director, Babelscape

Roberto Navigli is Professor of Natural Language Processing at Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP Group. He is a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, ELLIS, and EurAI. He has received two ERC grants on multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics, highlighted among the 15 projects through which the ERC has transformed science, as well as several prizes and awards from leading AI and NLP journals and conferences. He is the creator of BabelNet and leads the Minerva LLM and ChatMinerva projects - the first family of LLMs and AI assistants pretrained with a focus on Italian, and among the very few initiatives of this kind in Europe. He is also Scientific Director and co-founder of Babelscape, a successful deep-tech company with ten years of experience in research-driven multilingual neuro-symbolic NLP. He is an Action Editor of TACL, served as General Chair of ACL 2025, and has served as an Associate Editor of the AI Journal.

Iz Beltagy Iz Beltagy
Leading Olmo Scaling @ Ai2 | Cofounder @ Envive AI

Iz Beltagy leads the Scaling team at Ai2, where he directs the research and engineering behind future releases of OLMo, Ai2’s family of fully open language models, advancing the state of the art in open-source AI. Before returning to Ai2, he co-founded Envive, a startup focusing on post-training and RL for e-commerce, and took the company from zero to pre-Series B. Earlier at Ai2, he was the research lead for OLMo from its inception. His work on open language models goes back to 2018, with widely used contributions including SciBERT, Longformer, and BLOOM, making him a longtime contributor to open AI research well before it became a mainstream pursuit. His research has been recognized with awards at ACL 2024, AKBC 2021, ACL 2020. Iz received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, advised by Ray Mooney and Katrin Erk.

Heng Ji Heng Ji
Professor, UIUC AI Center | Founding Director of Amazon | Founding Director of Capital One

Heng Ji is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the Founding Director of Amazon-Illinois AI Center and CapitalOne-Illinois AI Center. She is named as an ACL Fellow in 2025 for her “significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction and AI for science.” The awards she received include Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024, two Outstanding Paper Awards at NAACL 2024, “Young Scientist” by the World Laureates Association, “Young Scientist” and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum, UIUC “Outstanding Advisor of the Year”, Amazon Scholar, “Women Leaders of Conversational AI”, “AI’s 10 to Watch” Award, NSF CAREER award, “Best of ICDM 2013” paper award, “Best of SDM 2013” paper award, ACL 2020 Best Demo Paper Award and NAACL 2021 Best Demo Paper Award. She served as the PC chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022.

Trung Bui Trung Bui
Senior Research Scientist and Research Manager - Adobe Research

Trung is a researcher and manager of the Natural Language Group at Adobe Research, where he develops machine learning technologies for Adobe digital media and digital marketing products, spanning dialogue systems, multimodal interfaces, search and recommendation, and AI for healthcare. His honors include the SIGDIAL 2018 Best Paper Award, first place in the 2016 Dialog State Tracking Challenge, and the 2021 ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for healthcare AI work he co-led. Before joining Adobe Research in 2012, Trung held research roles at EPFL, the University of Twente, Stanford University, and North Side Inc., a path spanning academia and industry across four countries. Since 2004, he has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and holds over 60 patents, with more than 60 pending. He has mentored or co-mentored roughly 80 interns and serves as an area chair for the ACL Industry Track, NeurIPS, and ICML.

Moderator

Yang Liu Yang Liu
Senior Principal Scientist, AGI, Amazon

Yang Liu is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon AGI. Before joining Amazon, she served as Head of the LAIX Silicon Valley AI Lab, Research Scientist at Facebook, Visiting Scientist at Google, faculty member at the University of Texas at Dallas, and researcher at ICSI, Berkeley. Yang received her B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University and her Ph.D. from Purdue University. As a faculty member at UT Dallas, she received the NSF CAREER Award and the Air Force Young Investigator (YIP) Award. She served as General Chair for ACL 2023 and Program Co-Chair for EMNLP 2020. She is an IEEE Fellow and an ISCA Fellow.