Speaker: James Caverlee, Ph.D. Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, Texas A&M University
Faculty Host: Yu Ding, TAMIDS
Abstract: Have you ever wondered how Siri works? Or Alexa? Better yet, have you ever been frustrated because these conversational systems just don’t seem to understand what you really want? In this tutorial, the speaker will introduce the science underlying conversational systems like Alexa and Siri. Together, we’ll go over the big research challenges in artificial intelligence, natural language understanding and machine learning that need to be overcome for conversational AI to become truly trustworthy. In particular, the speaker will highlight many of the challenges and lessons learned from leading the Texas A&M team in the 2021-22 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge.
Biography: Dr. James Caverlee is a Professor at Texas A&M University in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research targets topics from recommender systems, social media, information retrieval, data mining, and emerging networked information systems. His group has been supported by NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, Amazon, Google, among others. Dr. Caverlee was general co-chair of the 13th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2020), and has been a senior program committee member of venues like KDD, SIGIR, SDM, WSDM, and ICWSM.
You can also click this link to join the seminar
For more information about TAMIDS seminar series, please contact Ms. Jennifer South at jsouth@tamu.edu