2/12/2026 Rudy San Miguel
In preparation for the Spring 2026 symposium, AICE revisits its successful fall event.
Written by Rudy San Miguel
The Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE) at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in the Grainger College of Engineering will host its 2026 Spring symposium on April 17, 2026 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The center, a collaboration between Illinois and Amazon, aims to “develop intelligent conversational systems that demonstrate contextual understanding and emotional intelligence, allow for personalization, and the ability to interpret non-verbal communication while being ethical and fair.”
Taking notes from its well-received fall symposium, which took place at the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science on October 16, 2025, AICE leaders hope to surpass that high bar in the spring. The day-long symposium was packed with featured keynote speakers and panelists, all experts in AI from Illinois and Amazon, as well as a poster session by current Illinois CS students.
Heng Ji, CS professor and founding director of AICE, led the symposium by sharing the progress achieved over the previous six months, including an increase in the number of research projects sponsored by Amazon to more than 10 in 2025 and the award of 20 new AI PhD fellowships. The collaboration deepens year-over-year, and in 2025, more than 70 Illinois PhD students were sent to Amazon as science interns and full-time researchers.
“It was the largest number of interns from a university,” Ji said, highlighting the successful collaboration. “In return, these Illinois alumni came back to this symposium to give keynotes and become active participants in our collaborative AI research."
Ji, along with Dilek Hakkani-Tur, CS professor and AICE associate director, and Ruhi Sarikaya, Alexa AI vice president and AICE liaison, elaborated on the achievements attained during the six months prior to the spring symposium: AICE PI and PhD fellows published more than 50 papers; Yuxiong Wang, CS assistant professor and fellow, won the DARPA Young Faculty Award; Jiawei Liu, CS PhD, studying with Lingming Zhang, CS associate professor, won ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, Distinguished Artifact Award, Machine Learning and Systems Rising Stars, MLCommons, and first place at Amazon Nova AI Challenge 2025 which came with a $250,000 prize.
AICE also highlighted Illinois' leadership in multi-disciplinary research centers and institutes, including AICE, Capital One Illinois ASKS Center, NSF AI Research Institutes, and the Center for Immersive Computing.
Opening remarks were provided by Ji, Sarikaya and Nancy Amato, Abel Bliss Professor and Siebel School director. Keynote addresses were provided by Tal August, CS assistant professor, with his talk, “Personalizing knowledge through interactive systems”; Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, CS professor, spoke on “Process-centric analysis of agents and the path to future”; George Karypis, Amazon senior principal scientist, discussed “Open tools and models: accelerating discovery and innovation”; and Zoey Li, Amazon AI applied scientist, presented “Developing scaling laws for benchmark performance prediction.”
Additional presenters included:
- Invited speakers:
- Payal Motwani, Amazon principal technical program manager AGI foundations, “Catastrophic risk evaluations"
- Meiqi Sun, Amazon AGI Foundations technical staff member, “Inside the mind of an agent: How models learn to reason and think”
- AICE 2025-26 research projects:
- Narendra Ahuja, ECE research professor, “Understanding multimodal video contents”
- Bin Hu, ECE assistant professor, “MEDAL: Multi-disciplinary Engineering Design Agents in the Loop”
- Jian Huang, ECE associate professor, “Low-cost training and inference of LLMs with system and model co-design”
- Ge Liu, CS assistant professor, “Towards diffusion foundation model for multimodal reasoning”
- Hao Peng, CS assistant professor, “What the heck is going on with RL for LLMs and what does it imply?”
- Haohan Wang, iSchool assistant professor “Adaptive representation guard: Detecting and neutralizing prompt injection via LLM activation monitoring”
- Panelists:
- Pradeep Natarajan (moderator), Amazon senior principal scientist
- Gokhan Tur (moderator), CS research professor
- Tal August
- Varun Chandrasekaran, ECE assistant professor
- Edward Guo, Applied Science Alexa AI director
- Bin Hu
- Reyhaneh Jabbarvand
- Zoey Li
- Kevin Small, Amazon principal applied scientist
- Meiqi Sun
- Swastik Roy, Amazon applied scientist
- Jiaxuan You, CS assistant professor
- PhD fellow presentations:
For more information about AICE and the 2026 symposium, visit the AICE site.
Grainger Engineering affiliations
Nancy M. Amato is an Illinois Grainger professor of computer science and the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science as well as director of the Siebel School. Amato is affiliated with the Computing Research Association (CRA) as past board chair and is president elect of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).
Heng Ji is an Illinois Grainger professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and an affiliated electrical and computer engineering faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is the founding director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE).
Dilek Hakkani-Tur is an Illinois Grainger professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. She is an Amazon scholar at Amazon Health Science.
Yuxiong Wang is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Tal August is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
Lingming Zhang is an Illinois Grainger associate professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Reyhaneh Jabbarvand is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Narendra Ahuja is an Illinois Grainger research professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Bin Hu is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Jian Huang is an Illinois Grainger associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Ge Liu is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Hao Peng is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Haohan Wang is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Gokhan Tur is an Illinois Grainger research professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Varun Chandrasekaran is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Jiaxuan You is an assistant professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.