A Vanderbilt computer science team - Jules White (associate professor of computer science), and graduate CS assistants Quchen Fu and Zhongwei Teng - shortened the distance with a top prize-winning computer model showcased in a high-powered competition at one of the two leading international conferences in artificial intelligence and deep learning—the 2020 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, which ended Dec. 12.

The idea is to create natural language processors that will allow users to type in English what they want to do without searching for commands they don’t know for the task they’re working on. Instead, the model translates for them.

The competition featured 16 teams from around the world. Overall, the competition received more than 200 submissions, split over the development (38), validation (119) and test (47) phases. Conference organizers reported that the 2020 virtual conference was “exceptional and historic” and drew more than 23,ooo attendees. IBM Research Blog reported more than 13,000 attendees in 2019.

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