The Conversational Web

Larry Heck

Microsoft Research
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
12:30 PM, ICSI Lecture Hall
 

Abstract

There is currently significant interest in the speech, language, and human computer interaction (HCI) scientific communities in creating a conversational interface to the web. Through the combination of natural language (spoken and written) with gesture, touch, and gaze, this natural user interface (NUI) could help you complete online tasks, find what you want, and answer any question as naturally as having a conversation - anytime, anywhere. This talk explores the emergence of this Conversational Web. I will give an overview of the lab’s research in this area, and then discuss my research on unsupervised learning of statistical models for conversational interfaces.

Speaker Biography

Larry Heck is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, and the Chief Scientist for the Conversational Systems Research Center (CSRC) in Microsoft Research. As Chief Scientist, he is responsible for the deciding the CSRC's long-term vision, direction, and research program. From 2005 to 2009, he was Vice President of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo!, responsible for the creation, development, and deployment of the algorithms powering Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Yahoo! Content Match, and Yahoo! display advertising. From 1998 to 2005, he was with Nuance Communications and served as Vice President of R&D, responsible for natural language processing, speech recognition, voice authentication, and text-to-speech synthesis technology. He began his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (1992-1998), initially in the field of acoustics and later in speech research with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. Dr. Heck received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991.