Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI)

With Giuseppe Riccardi (Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento) and
Giuseppe “Pino” Di Fabbrizio (VUI, Inc.)
Alessandra Cervone (Amazon Alexa AI)

Conversations are the primary means for humans to develop and prosper over their entire life.
Whether a machine in its various forms, souls and shapes can engage into a conversation is a dream and a curiosity that we have been carrying out for a long time. That will continue to be for a long time.
In the meantime, we want to take a snapshot at today’s state-of-the-art.

In this session we will describe what is Conversational AI and how it may be permeating our daily conversations and interactions. Is this type of technology real, and how real ? How it can help us, humans?
We will share views from the research and industry labs.

Registration

Mandatory registration for attendance in person. Fill out the online registration form and choose the Open Research you are interested in.

It is also possible to follow the seminar via Webinar on Zoom at
https://unitn.zoom.us/j/89357062412?pwd=ZFl4S2Y0QWE1SXdRbEQ5TEFOdmQyQT09
Passcode: 554910

About the speakers

Pino Di Fabbrizio is VUI, Inc.’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder. Before VUI, he was a principal research scientist and group leader at the Rakuten Institute of Technology in Boston. He was previously a senior research scientist at Amazon Alexa Science and a lead research scientist at AT&T – Labs Research. His research interests and publication topics include conversational agents, machine learning, natural language understanding, natural language generation, and large-scale speech system architectures. He published more than 70 papers and was awarded 32 patents. As a senior IEEE member, he regularly contributes to international scientific committees and editorial boards.

Alessandra Cervone is an Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa AI, working on conversational AI in the Natural Understanding team. Alessandra holds a MSc in Speech and Language Processing from University of Edinburgh and a PhD from DISI, University of Trento. During the PhD Alessandra worked on conversational AI in the Signals and Interactive Systems lab, advised by professor Giuseppe Riccardi. In 2016, she was the team leader of the UniTN team selected to compete in the first edition of the Alexa Prize, an international challenge to create a more conversational version of Alexa.