AICE Symposium celebrates center's continued collaborative success

The 2026 Amazon-Illinois Center for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE) Spring Symposium took place on April 17 at the Siebel Center for Computer Science, showcasing the limitless opportunities and research projects ahead between Amazon and Illinois as well as the advancements achieved since the start of the collaboration.

Photo Credit: Rudy San Miguel/Siebel School

Guests were welcomed with opening remarks by Nancy Amato, Abel Bliss Professor and Siebel School director, Heng Ji, CS professor and AICE founding director, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, CS professor, AICE director and Amazon Scholar, and  Ruhi Sarikaya, CS adjunct professor and Vice President Alexa AI and AICE liaison.

"AICE has been growing significantly in terms of the number of projects that result in long-term collaborations and internships and also support from Amazon," Hakkani-Tür said.  "In addition to usual teams, we had participation from additional teams this year, which is important for involving a diverse group of topics and faculty in the collaborative projects."

Ji added, “Illinois’ partnership with Amazon continues to produce substantial, lasting results.”

In her opening remarks, Ji elaborated on the partnership, noting that Illinois sent the largest number of interns and full-time researchers to Amazon. She also pointed to Illinois’ recent hosting of the 2026 Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD). “Amazon was the largest sponsor for MSLD.”

Ji highlighted the numerous accomplishments of AICE fellows, which included:

• Sarikaya’s appointment as CS adjunct professor
• AICE PhD fellow Rajalaxmi Rajagopalan received the A.R. “Buck” Knight Fellowship Award
• 30+ papers, many spotlight papers, published in collaboration with Amazon partners at top venues
• 10 keynote speeches, invited talks and conference tutorials

Ji was also named an ACL Fellow.

Hakkani-Tür highlighted the role AICE plays in initiating long-term collaborations between Illinois faculty, students and Amazon scientists.

"It helps faculty identify challenging problems that are impactful for industry and similarly helps Amazon scientists dive deeper into research that our faculty has been working on," she said. "Finally, it helps both sides start new  collaborations and strengthen the existing ones through in-person discussions."

Photo Credit: Rudy San Miguel/Siebel School

She also elaborated on the success of the spring symposium. "The Amazon Research Panel discussions were very helpful for Illinois faculty and students to get some visibility into what problems would be interesting to collaborate on in the future," Hakkani-Tür said. "Amazon scientists also provided great feedback to students on how to prepare for internship applications, internship projects and the job market in general."

Keynote addresses were provided by Minje Kim, CS associate professor, and Ge Liu, CS assistant professor.

Photo Credit: Rudy San Miguel/Siebel School

Additional presentations included:

• AICE 2025-26 PhD Fellow Presentations:
  • Zhenhailong Wang
  • Rajalaxmi Rajagopalan
  • Nikoleta Iliakopoulou
• AICE 2025-26 Research Projects:
  • Hao Zhang, CS PhD, on behalf of Narendra Ahuja, CS research professor, “Understanding Multimodal Video Contents”
  • Hao Peng, CS assistant professor, “Accurate and Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Reasoning”
  • Daniel Alabi, ECE assistant professor, “Imperceptible, Unforgeable, and Robust Watermarking of Generative Agents at Scale”
  • Gagandeep Singh, CS assistant professor, “Quantifying Catastrophic Risks of Frontier Models with Formal Guarantees”
  • Haohan Wang, iSchool assistant professor, “Adaptive Representation Guard: Detecting and Neutralizing Prompt Injection via LLM Activation Monitoring”
  • Yang Chen, CS PhD, “Formulating Multi-Agent Planning and Interaction into Collaborative Programming”

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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.

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. 

Dilek Hakkani-Tür is an Illinois Grainger professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. 

Ruhi Sarikaya is an Illinois Grainger adjunct professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.

Minje Kim is an Illinois Grainger associate professor of computer science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.

Ge Liu 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. 

Daniel Alabi is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and assistant professor of computers science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.

Gagandeep Singh 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.