Yang Xu is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. He obtained his BA/MEng from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University. He took a postdoctoral position in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. His current research focuses on understanding the human lexicon from a computational perspective, particularly how word meanings vary over time and across languages. He also develops computational methods for exploring diachronic processes such as semantic change and moral change.