BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Moving towards Human-like reasoning in AI assistants  - Craig Saun
 ders of Amazon
DTSTART:20230126T183000Z
DTEND:20230126T200000Z
UID:TALK193591@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:David Blake
DESCRIPTION:A talk by Craig Saunders of Amazon in Cambridge.\n\nVoice assi
 stants such as Alexa continue to improve in their capabilities and utility
  for customers. Since launch\, the use of voice as an interaction modality
  has expanded\, and talking to such assistants is ever more natural. One o
 f the next steps in voice AI becoming a truly ambient intelligent service 
 is in the development of increased reasoning and generalised intelligence 
 technologies\, both to complete more complex tasks\, but also understand t
 he latent goal of a user. Even what can appear as a simple interaction on 
 the surface can require a lot of knowledge and reasoning capability to und
 erstand and act. In this talk we will use several examples to discuss a po
 tential evolution of reasoning in voice AI.\n\nCraig Saunders is Director 
 of Machine Learning in Alexa AI. He leads the Evi team\, which was one of 
 the early acquisitions that contributed to Alexa’s technology. Craig com
 pleted a PhD in 2000 in Machine Learning and spent 9 years as a University
  academic before moving to industry at Xerox Research Centre Europe. He ha
 s conducted fundamental research into machine learning\, NLP and computer 
 vision\, and applied research to deliver state of the art solutions in man
 y industries including finance\, legal\, healthcare\, and BPO processing. 
 Craig joined Amazon and the Alexa team in 2017\, where he’s worked on sc
 aling Alexa’s knowledge and question answering capabilities.
LOCATION:CUED. LR0
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR