João Sedoc is a faculty member in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at NYU. He received his BS in Mathematics, BSE in Computer Science and Engineering, and PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Before joining NYU Stern, João worked as an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has also worked in quantitative finance, having started Chivalric Trading, been a portfolio manager at Millennium Management and worked as a researcher at BNP Paribas / Cooper Neff.

João's research areas are at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with a special focus on conversational agents, hierarchical models, deep learning, spectral clustering, spectral estimation of hidden Markov models, and time series analysis.

For a sample of the topics where he applies these methods, check out some of the recent publications in his Google Scholar page,  such as  "Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Improve Food Assistance: A Scoping Review of Machine Learning Tools";   "Empathic Conversations: A Multi-level Dataset of Contextualized Conversations";  "Health-focused conversational agents in person-centered care: a review of apps"; "Gendered Information in Resumes and its Role in Algorithmic and Human Hiring Bias";  "Natural language processing methods are sensitive to sub-clinical linguistic differences in schizophrenia spectrum disorders";  "Multi-Emotion Classification for Song Lyrics".

For this edition of Dinners With Interesting People, we're going to try a new approach. Participants should bring their own dinners, from McClelland Express or anywhere else, and we'll supply some nice desserts. No RSVP is required.