13
Oct
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Talks. Tagged: interactive drama, natural language, semantic memory, social learning. Leave a Comment
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
29
Aug
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, cognitive media, creativity, information retrieval, Learning, meta-reasoning, natural language, personality models, planning, problem solving, semantic memory. Leave a Comment
We’ve hit another milestone in the Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI. University teams from around the world have been hard at work to create a socialbot, an AI capable of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events for 20 minutes.
I am now excited to announce the university teams that will be competing in the finals! After hundreds of thousands of conversations, the two socialbots with the highest average customer ratings during the semifinal period are Alquist from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Sounding Board from the University of Washington in Seattle. The wildcard team is What’s Up Bot from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
READ MORE:
developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/783df492-4770-4b11-81ac-59e009669d56/announcing-the-2017-alexa-prize-finalists
19
Jul
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Talks. Leave a Comment
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.
Read more / View the talk:
blog.udacity.com/2017/07/ashwin-ram-sebastian-thrun-discuss-ai.html
1
Jun
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, cognitive media, goal-driven learning, information retrieval, interactive drama, Learning, natural language, personality models, problem solving, semantic memory. 3 Comments
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).
18
May
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, cognitive media, creativity, information retrieval, Learning, meta-reasoning, natural language, personality models, planning, problem solving, semantic memory. Leave a Comment
On September 29, 2016, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI through voice. In April, university teams from around the world assembled at the appropriately named Day 1 building in Seattle for the Alexa Prize Summit. The event was a base camp for teams to share learnings and make preparations for the most challenging leg of their journey: to build and scale an AI capable of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes.
As they build their “socialbots,” they will encounter esoteric problems like context modeling and dialog planning as well as exoteric problems like user experience and conversational engagement. And they will need all the help they can get.
We invite you to join the students on their journey and help them along the way. You can interact with their socialbots simply by saying, “Alexa, let’s chat” on any device with Alexa.
READ MORE:
developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/e4cc64d1-f334-4d2d-8609-5627939f9bf7/join-the-alexa-prize-journey-and-test-the-socialbots
23
Feb
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Talks. Tagged: believable agents, cognitive media, creativity, goal-driven learning, information retrieval, Learning, meta-reasoning, natural language, personality models, problem solving. Leave a Comment
No longer is AI solely a subject of science fiction. Advances in AI have resulted in enabling technologies for computer vision, planning, decision making, robotics, and most recently spoken language understanding. These technologies are driving business growth, and releasing workers to engage in more creative and valuable tasks.
I’ll talk about the moved from the age of the keyboard, to the age of touch, and are now entering the age of voice. Alexa is making this future possible. Amazon is committed to fostering a robust cloud-based voice service, and it is this voice service that the innovators of today, tomorrow, and beyond will be building. It is this voice service—and the ecosystem around it—that awaits the next generation of AI talent.
Keynote at Udacity Intersect Conference, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, March 8, 2017.
READ MORE:
blog.udacity.com/2017/02/dr-ashwin-ram-intersect-2017-speaker.html
VIEW THE TALK:
linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6286681682187812864
14
Nov
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, cognitive media, creativity, information retrieval, interactive drama, Learning, meta-reasoning, natural language, personality models, planning, problem solving, semantic memory. Leave a Comment
On September 29, 2016, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI through voice. We received applications from leading universities across 22 countries. Each application was carefully reviewed by senior Amazon personnel against a rigorous set of criteria covering scientific contribution, technical merit, novelty, and ability to execute. Teams of scientists, engineers, user experience designers, and product managers read, evaluated, discussed, argued, and finally selected the ten teams who would be invited to participate in the competition. Wait, make that twelve; we received so many good applications from graduate and undergraduate students that we decided to sponsor two additional teams.
Today, we’re excited to announce the 12 teams selected to compete with an Amazon sponsorship.
READ MORE:
developer.amazon.com/blogs/post/Tx1UXVV4VJTPYTL/announcing-the-sponsored-teams-for-the-2016-2017-alexa-prize
29
Sep
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Language, Learning, Opinion, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: believable agents, cognitive media, creativity, information retrieval, interactive drama, Learning, meta-reasoning, natural language, personality models, planning, problem solving, semantic memory. Leave a Comment
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous. With advances in technology, algorithms, and sheer compute power, it is now becoming practical to utilize AI techniques in many everyday applications including transportation, healthcare, gaming, productivity, and media. Yet one seemingly intuitive task for humans still eludes computers: natural conversation. Simple and natural for humans, voice communication in everyday language continues to be one of the ultimate challenges for AI.
Today, we are pleased to announce the Alexa Prize, a $2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI through voice. Teams of university students around the world are invited to participate in the Alexa Prize (see contest rules for details). The challenge is to create a socialbot, an Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes. We challenge teams to invent an Alexa socialbot smart enough to engage in a fun, high quality conversation on popular topics for 20 minutes.
Are you up to the challenge?
READ MORE:
developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx221UQAWNUXON3/Are-you-up-to-the-Challenge-Announcing-the-Alexa-Prize-2-5-Million-to-Advance-Co
15
Jan
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: cognitive media, healthcare, social learning. Leave a Comment
Novel methods of promoting self-monitoring and social support are needed to ensure long-term maintenance of behavior change. In this paper, we directly investigate the effects of group support in an exercise and nutrition program delivered by an mHealth application called Fittle.
Our first specific study aim was to explore whether social support improved adherence in wellness programs. Our second specific study aim was to assess whether media types (ePaper vs mobile) were associated with different levels of compliance and adherence to wellness programs. The third aim was to assess whether the use of an mHealth application led to positive changes to participants’ eating behavior, physical activity, and stress level, compared to traditional paper-based programs.
Conclusions: The team-based Fittle app is an acceptable and feasible wellness behavior change intervention and a full randomized controlled trial to investigate the efficacy of such an intervention is warranted.
A Group-Based Mobile Application to Increase Adherence in Exercise and Nutrition Programs: A Factorial Design Feasibility Study
by Honglu Du, Anusha Venkatakrishnan, Michael Youngblood, Ashwin Ram, Peter Pirolli
Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) mHealth uHealth, 4(1), 2016.
mhealth.jmir.org/2016/1/e4/
8
Jul
Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Health & Wellness, Talks, Web / Web 2.0. Tagged: case-based reasoning, cognitive media, healthcare. Leave a Comment
In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, Marc Andreessen wrote: “Software is eating the world. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software. Healthcare and education are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.”
What is the impending disruption in healthcare, and what new technologies are driving it? I argue that the problem is not healthcare but health: creating new consumer-centric approaches to health and wellness that increase engagement, improve health literacy and promote behavior change.
The web is evolving from information (portals) to interaction (social/mobile) to influence: shaping attitudes and behaviors. This creates a unique opportunity to address the problem of consumer health and wellness. But, to do this effectively requires a new kind of technology: user modeling. It also requires an innovation methodology that is fundamentally about people, not technology.
At PARC, our research in Augmented Social Cognition is centered around the confluence of three technologies: social, mobile, and user modeling. I discuss these technologies and explain how we leverage artificial Intelligence (AI) and case-based reasoning (CBR) techniques to model users and create effective and sustainable behavior change.
Invited talk at CBR-2013 Industry Day, Saratoga Springs, NY, July 8, 2013.
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