Shane Storks profile image

Shane Storks

Hello! I’m a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. There, I work with Joyce Chai and the Situated Language and Embodied Dialogue (SLED) group. My research focuses on robust and coherent natural language understanding and commonsense reasoning, both for language models and embodied agents.

In my free time, I love to hike, game, go to concerts, and collect vinyl records. I volunteer with Macomb Science Olympiad to help inspire the next generation of scientists from my hometown.

Education
  • University seal.
    Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering

    2024 (expected), University of Michigan

  • University seal.
    Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering

    2021, University of Michigan

  • University seal.
    Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science

    2018, Lawrence Technological University

Research publications and preprints.

2021

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics: Toward Verifiable Commonsense Language Understanding
    Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Yichi Zhang, and Joyce Chai
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021 (2021)
    Publication Preprint Code Poster Slides

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg: Assessing Coherence of Text Classifiers
    Shane Storks and Joyce Chai
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021 (2021)
    Publication Preprint Code Slides

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Are We There Yet? Learning to Localize in Embodied Instruction Following
    Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Govind Thattai, and Gokhan Tur
    AAAI-21 Workshop on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence (2021)
    Preprint Slides

2020

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Recent Advances in Natural Language Inference: A Survey of Benchmarks, Resources, and Approaches
    Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, and Joyce Y. Chai
    arXiv:1904.01172 [cs.CL] (2020)
    Preprint

Courses for which I've served as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI). Duties typically include assignment and project design, grading, supporting students through office hours and online interactions, and occasionally giving lectures.

University logo
EECS 595: Natural Language Processing
Fall 2021

University of Michigan

Graduate introductory NLP course led by Joyce Chai. Topics include syntax, semantics, discourse, deep learning for NLP, and their applications in information extraction, machine translation, and dialogue systems.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
University logo
EECS 595: Natural Language Processing
Fall 2020

University of Michigan

Graduate introductory NLP course led by Joyce Chai. Topics include syntax, semantics, discourse, deep learning for NLP, and their applications in information extraction, machine translation, and dialogue systems.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)

Professional appointments in industry.

Amazon Alexa AI
June 2021 - August 2021

Applied Scientist Intern

Natural Understanding, Teachable AI team (remote). Completed a self-contained research project on multi-hop reasoning advised by mentors Qiaozi Gao and Govind Thattai.

Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Amazon Alexa AI
June 2020 - August 2020

Applied Scientist Intern

Natural Understanding, Teachable AI team (remote). Completed a self-contained research project on embodied instruction following advised by mentor Qiaozi Gao.

Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Universal Logistics Holdings, Inc.
January 2017 - July 2018

Junior .NET Developer and Data Analyst

Used C#, VB.NET, and .SQL to create and maintain company databases, warehouse management applications, telemetric data stream processors, and big data visualizations.

Warren, MI, USA
Dominion Technologies Group, Inc.
June 2016 - December 2016

Junior Programmer

Used Visual C# to build and modify user interfaces for automotive assembly machines including fluid fill and alignment.

Roseville, MI, USA
Platinum Radiology
March 2014 - September 2016

Web Developer

Freelance web design work; optimized and maintained a healthcare consulting business website.

Remote
Dominion Technologies Group, Inc.
September 2015 - June 2016

Technical Assistant

Authored and prepared technical manuals for automotive assembly machines. Synthesized schematic diagrams of fluid and electric circuits with input from subject matter experts.

Roseville, MI, USA

Unpublished course projects and side projects. Ask me about them if you're interested!

2021

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Invariant Extended Kalman Filter for Localization in Underwater Caves
    Samuel Ansaldo, AJ Bull, Xinyu Ma, Alyssa Scheske, and Shane Storks
    EECS 568 (Mobile Robotics), University of Michigan (2021)
    Code Video

2020

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Toward More Faithful Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents
    Shane Storks, Tianrong Zhang, and Wenyi Wu
    EECS 598 (Special Topics: Situated Language Processing for Embodied AI), University of Michigan (2020)

2019

    Publication preview image. Open preprint or publication for readable version.
    Using Twitter to Rank Musical Artist Popularity
    Shane Storks and Andrew Schmidt
    CSE 881 (Data Mining), Michigan State University (2019)
    Code

Undergraduate students I've collaborated with or helped advise on research. If you're a UMich student interested in my research and would like to work with me, please apply here and send me an email.

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