Prashant Jayannavar
PhD, Computer Science · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Open to Research Scientist & Applied Scientist roles
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I am a recent CS PhD graduate from UIUC, advised by Prof. Julia Hockenmaier, specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP). My research centers on instruction following in embodied dialogue, using games as simulated environments. Themes include human-AI collaboration, spatial reasoning, SLMs, synthetic data, and evaluation benchmarks.
Previously, I spent 2.5 years as an Applied Scientist at the AI startup x.ai (acquired by Bizzabo), building a task-oriented dialogue agent to automate email-based meeting scheduling.
PhD Thesis Committee
News
- Mar 2026 BAP v2 selected for oral presentation at ACL 2026 — see you in San Diego!
- Feb 2026 Organizing a special session on Evaluating and Advancing Spatial Intelligence through Games at IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2026, with Alessandro Suglia, Sina Zarrieß, and Massimo Poesio. [LinkedIn · X]
- Jan 2026 Successfully defended my PhD!
- Dec 2025 BAP v2 accepted as a long paper in the Computational Linguistics journal. [LinkedIn · X]
- Dec 2024 Invited participant at Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 24492: Human in the Loop Learning through Grounded Interaction in Games, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany (Dec 1–6, 2024).
Publications
J = Journal · C = Conference · W = Workshop · D = Demo · R = Report
* denotes equal contribution
Selected Papers
Computational Linguistics, 2025 (*selected for oral presentation at ACL 2026)
Dagstuhl Reports, Vol. 14, Issue 12, 2025
Other Papers
CLFL Workshop, NAACL HLT 2015
Curriculum Vitae
A more detailed summary of my background and experience.
Download CV (PDF)