Our Joint CSE/IST Colloquium Series in Natural Language Processing will host Srinivas Bangalore this week!

The second Joint CSE/IST Colloquium is happening this Friday,  November 2nd!

Opportunities and Challenges in Enterprise Conversational Virtual Agents

The field of language technologies continues to be transformed, fueled by ever increasing size of corpora that are processed on resource-demanding computing platforms with compute-intensive algorithms implemented in open source software. With the availability of shared tools, methods to solve disparate language problems are being unified, sidelining the idiosyncrasies of each problem. Tasks such as speech recognition, language translation, dialog management are increasingly formulated as end-to-end transductions that question the need for intermediate representations. It is in this context, we present the practical challenges and opportunities arising in a large-scale, speech-driven conversational agent deployed on a human-augmented platform that services over a billion calls a year for brand-name enterprises.

Dr. Srinivas Bangalore is the Director of AI Research technologies at Interactions LLC leading the transfer of language technologies to produce transformational impact on Interactions business.  He has made significant contributions to many areas of natural language processing including Parsing, Spoken Language Translation, Multimodal Understanding, Language Generation and Question-Answering and continues to lead the language community through teaching and mentoring, publishing technical papers, and organizing conferences.  He has co-edited books on Supertagging, Natural Language Generation, and Language Translation, has authored over a 100 research publications and holds over 120 patents in these areas. Dr. Bangalore has been an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University (2005), a visiting professor at Princeton University (2008-present) and Otto Monstead Professor at Copenhagen Business School (2013). He was awarded the Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff award for outstanding dissertation, the AT&T Outstanding Mentor Award, in recognition of his support and dedication to AT&T Labs Mentoring Program and the AT&T Science & Technology Medal for technical leadership and innovative contributions in Spoken Language Technology and Services.

Find more about his work here.