AI is getting liberated – it is coming out of tech companies and research labs and is rapidly entering daily life. In this event-opening keynote, I take a forward-looking perspective of AI in hardware and discuss how the burgeoning ubiquity of AI is going to affect hardware businesses moving forward.
As AI begins to pave the way toward the creation of more intelligent hardware devices, the timing is perfect to be focusing on the impact that AI will have on all aspects of hardware, durable goods, and consumer products. This ranges from design and manufacturing to collecting, organizing and analyzing large amounts of data that enable new capabilities and business models. I present our vision to democratize AI and how you can use Google AI to capture this impact in your own work.
Keynote talk at HardwareCon 2019, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, April 2019.
Google has created 8 products with over a billion users each. These products are powered by AI (artificial intelligence) at every level — from the core infrastructure and software platform to the application logic and the user interface. I’ll share a behind-the-scenes look at how Google AI works and how we use it to create innovative UX (user experience) at a planetary scale. I’ll end with our vision to democratize AI and how you can use Google AI in your own work.
Keynote talk at ACM IUI-2019 Intelligent User Interfaces: Where HCI Meets AI, Los Angeles, March 2019.
The Alexa Prize is an annual university competition to advance the state of Conversational AI. Last November, Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist, Alexa Machine Learning, and I had the pleasure of announcing the winner of the inaugural competition.
Judging a conversational AI competition is super hard because conversation is inherently subjective; there isn’t a clear right or wrong response at each turn in a dialog, nor a precise definition of what makes a conversation “coherent” or “engaging”. This short film explains how the finals were conducted, and showcases the winning teams from University of Washington, Czech Technical University, and Heriot-Watt University.
See what the best conversational socialbots can do today, and what more needs to be done to solve this very hard problem.
Much of the ballyhoo around intelligent home assistance devices is that they make life easier for us: from regulating our thermostats to freeing our hands while we check a favorite recipe for roast turkey, to playing that favorite jam to get us pumped up in the morning. And it turns out that because these devices are designed to learn from our patterns and habits, they become more helpful the longer we live with them.
In this podcast, Ashwin Ram, one of the minds behind Amazon Alexa, describes how the company is balancing privacy concerns with natural language recognition to design a more effective device.
KelloggInsight podcast with Jennifer Cutler, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management
Ashwin Ram works on the AI behind Alexa, one of several new bots that might change the way your home and your life function within the next few years. Imagine a bot that turns on your lights, shops for you, even helps you make decisions. Learn more about a bot-enabled future that might have you saying (like Shah Rukh Khan does): “Alexa, I love you!”
TALK & TRANSCRIPT:
#TomorrowsWorld made easier with Artificial Intelligence. #TEDTalksIndiaNayiSoch
ALL TED TALKS INDIA NAYI SOCH:
#TEDTalksIndiaNayiSoch is a groundbreaking TV series showcasing new thinking from some of the brightest brains in India and beyond and hosted by “The King of Bollywood,” Shah Rukh Khan.
Earlier today, Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist, Alexa Machine Learning, and I had the pleasure of announcing the winner of the inaugural Alexa Prize competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational artificial intelligence (AI).
Congratulations to team Sounding Board, an inspiring group of students from the University of Washington, whose socialbot earned an average score of 3.17 on a 5-point scale from our panel of independent judges and achieved an average conversation duration of 10:22. As the winner of our inaugural competition, team Sounding Board earned our $500,000 first-place prize, which will be shared among the students.
We also had the privilege of honoring and surprising our other finalists on stage. Our runner up was team Alquist from Czech Technical University in Prague. We presented them with a $100,000 prize for their efforts. We also awarded our third-place winner, team What’s Up Bot from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a $50,000 prize.
CHAT WITH THE WINNERS:
Just say “Alexa, let’s chat” to any Alexa-enabled device. (If you’re outside the U.S., set your Amazon Preferred Marketplace (PFM) to U.S. or use a U.S. based Amazon account.)
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and topics. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million-dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams were challenged to build conversational agents, known as “socialbots”, to converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics such as Sports, Politics, Entertainment, Fashion and Technology for 20 minutes.
The Alexa Prize offered the academic community a unique opportunity to perform research with a live system used by millions of users. The competition provided university teams with real user conversational data at scale, along with the user-provided ratings and feedback augmented with annotations by the Alexa team. This enabled teams to effectively iterate and make improvements throughout the competition while being evaluated in real-time through live user interactions.
To build their socialbots, university teams combined state-of-the-art techniques with novel strategies in the areas of Natural Language Understanding, Context Modeling, Dialog Management, Response Generation, and Knowledge Acquisition. To support the teams’ efforts, the Alexa Prize team made significant scientific and engineering investments to build and improve Conversational Speech Recognition, Topic Tracking, Dialog Evaluation, Voice User Experience, and tools for traffic management and scalability.
This paper outlines the advances created by the university teams as well as the Alexa Prize team to achieve the common goal of solving the problem of Conversational AI.
Conversational AI: The Science behind the Alexa Prize
by Ashwin Ram, Rohit Prasad, Chandra Khatri, Anu Venkatesh, Raefer Gabriel, Qing Liu, Jeff Nunn, Behnam Hedayatnia, Ming Cheng, Ashish Nagar, Eric King, Kate Bland, Amanda Wartick, Yi Pan, Han Song, Sk Jayadevan, Gene Hwang, Art Pettigrue
Proceedings of the 2017 Alexa Prize Invited talk at NIPS-2017 Workshop on Conversational AI
Invited talk at re:Invent 2017 (with Spyros Matsoukas)
News consumption is a passive experience—reading print or online newspapers, listening to radio shows and podcasts, watching television broadcasts. News producers create, curate, and organize content which consumers absorb passively. With the advent of interactive conversational technologies ranging from chatbots to voice-based conversational assistants such as Amazon Alexa, there is an opportunity to engage consumers in more interactive experiences around news.
At the Computation+Journalism symposium held at Northwestern University this year, Emily Withrow, editor at Quartz Bot Studio and assistant professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and I had a fireside chat to share recent technological developments in this area and explore what kinds of conversational news experiences these technologies might enable.
Panel at the 2017 Computation+Journalism Symposium, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. #cj2017
Udacity blog: Artificial Intelligence by its very nature promises so much, and the potential seems so vast it staggers the imagination. Excitement in this field runs higher every day, as the ongoing process of translating the possible into the actual produces newer and more incredible innovations.
With this excitement come concerns, of course, and it is perhaps understandable that some people continue to see Artificial Intelligence as some sort of a threat. This worry fails to take into consideration two key storylines: 1) AI is an augmentative technology; it extends our abilities, it does not replace them, and 2) AI, by assuming responsibility for repetitive and mundane tasks, frees us for more creative and fulfilling activity.
Some observers have even gone so far as to suggest that intelligent machines represent a kind of end to “human-ness” itself; meaning, those things we think of as being most human—the ability to love, to make moral and ethical decisions, to create art—are predicted to fall by the wayside before the advance of intelligent machines.
Dr. Ashwin Ram, Senior Manager of AI at Amazon Alexa, spoke to Sebastian Thrun, President and Co-Founder of Udacity, about AI, and his foundational exposure to the “human side of technology” as he pursued his PhD in AI at Yale. This is a deeply insightful conversation, and should be required viewing for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of AI, and what it all means for humanity.
As we moved from the age of the keyboard, to the age of touch, and now to the age of voice, natural conversation in everyday language continues to be one of the ultimate challenges for AI. This is a difficult scientific problem involving knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning, as well as a complex product design problem involving user experience and conversational engagement.
I will talk about why Conversational AI is hard, how conversational agents like Amazon Alexa understand and respond to voice interactions, how you can leverage these technologies for your own applications, and the challenges that still remain.
Variants of this talk presented (click links for video):
Keynote talks at The AI Conference (2017), O’Reilly AI Conference (2017), The AI Summit (2017), Stanford ASES Summit (2017), MLconf AI Conference (2017), Global AI Conference (2016).
Distinguished lectures at Georgia Tech/GVU (2017), Northwestern University (2017).
Keynote panel at Conversational Interaction Conference (2016).
Lightning TED-style talks at IIT Bay Area Conference (2017), Intersect (2017).
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