Abstract: According to Wikipedia, Watson is "an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team". Hiding behind this fairly bland definition is a complex set of technological challenges that cover areas ranging from NLP to context management, dialogue structure, feedback loops, and personalisation. In this talk Jennifer will first introduce several key NL projects from IBM Research to give an overview of the lab's work and will then delve into the Life of Watson, what 'he' could be when he 'grows up', and the many deep research questions that need to be addressed along the way.

Bio:

Jennifer Lai is a Research Staff Member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center where she manages a team of researchers responsible for the design and implementation of solutions that enable high productivity in knowledge workers. With over 20 years experience at Watson Research, her designs have included solutions for expertise sharing; skill acquisition; team communication and awareness; and most recently intelligent information interaction including visual analytics. Jennifer has 13 patents issued, 3 patents pending, several book chapters and over 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. She has been a guest lecturer at many universities, a National Science Foundation panelist, and is a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Speech Technology . Jennifer's technical expertise is in the areas of Human-Computer interaction, user experience design, communication applications, and multimodal technologies.

Joint ALTA/ADCS invited talk

Presenter: Prof. Maarten de Rijke (Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam )

Title: Diversity, Intent, and Aggregated Search