Speaker Bio: Dr. Hao Sun is a Research Scientist of Speech/Language AI at Pearson. A computational linguist and cognitive scientist by training, his expertise bridges theoretical research and application-oriented AI. Over his career, Dr. Sun has built extensive experience across multiple AI paradigms, including knowledge-symbolism, probabilistic graphical models, deep learning, and large language models. At Pearson, he develops language AI solutions for automated language assessment. Prior to this role, he led Natural Language Understanding research at Astound. AI, focusing on symbolic dialogue systems. Dr. Sun earned his B.S. from Fudan University and his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo, where his doctoral thesis proposed a novel paradigm with semantic embedding graphs for studying syntactic acquisition. His academic work leverages machine learning to simulate first language acquisition, linguistic diversity, and language evolution.