Public Lecture Explores Artificial Dialogue Agents with International Expert

David Traum speaking at the ADAPT centre in TCD on Artificial Dialog Agents
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International expert visits SFI ADAPT Centre to speak about the recent natural language dialogue research at the Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT) in the University of Southern California (USC).

Details:

Hybrid: In person at Trinity College Dublin, O’Reilly Institute / Online

Thursday 25th August

10am – 11.30am

Free Admission.

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming pervasive in all aspects of our world.  An upcoming public lecture by David Traum, Principal Scientist at the Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT) and Research Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), will explore Artificial Dialog Agents and some of the cutting-edge research that is taking place in this space.  This hybrid event is being organised by Dr Emer Gilmartin, researcher at  the SFI ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin.

Traum will present overviews and demonstrations of several recent and ongoing projects, showing some of the diversity of applications for computer systems that can engage people in multimodal dialogue. Projects overviewed include:

  • Simsensei (multi-modal psychological assessment – open ended elicitation)
  • Primer (middle-school bullying counselling, use of emotional assessment)
  • Bilingual Dialogue (language learning, language preservation, code-switching)
  • RAVE (pre-linguistic conversation, multimodal inputs)
  • New Dimensions in Testimony (preserve one-on-one history learning, support interaction with video of real person)
  • Mr Clue (word guessing game, multi-role interaction, learning by observing partner play complementary role in activity)
  • Botlanguage (robot search & navigation, multi-floor dialogue)
  • Human Swarm Interaction (multiple conversation threads)

The event is free and open to the public. Individuals interested in attending this invigorating event (in person or virtually), can register here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/talk-on-artificial-dialog-agents-with-david-traum-tickets-404034336577

Bio:

David Traum is a principal scientist at ICT and a research faculty member at the Department of Computer Science at USC. At ICT, Traum leads the Natural Language Dialogue Group, which consists of seven Ph.D.s, four students, and four other researchers. 

The group engages in research in all aspects of natural language dialogue, including dialogue management, spoken and natural language understanding and generation and dialogue evaluation. In addition, the group collaborates with others at ICT and elsewhere on integrated virtual humans, and transitioning natural language dialogue capability for use in training and other interactive applications.

Traum’s research focuses on dialogue communication between human and artificial agents. He has engaged in theoretical, implementational and empirical approaches to the problem, studying human-human natural language and multi-modal dialogue, as well as building a number of dialogue systems to communicate with human users. 

He has pioneered several research thrusts in computational dialogue modeling, including computational models of grounding (how common ground is established through conversation), the information state approach to dialogue, multiparty dialogue, and non-cooperative dialogue.

Traum is author of over 200 technical articles, is a founding editor of the Journal Dialogue and Discourse, has chaired and served on many conference program committees, and is currently the president emeritus of SIGDIAL, the international special interest group in discourse and dialogue. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at University of Rochester in 1994.

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