Pascale Fung | Deeper Conversational AI

Title: Deeper Conversational AI

Abstract:

Conversational AI systems interact with human users while completing user requests or simply chit-chat. These systems have applications ranging from personal assistance, health assistance to customer services, etc. In this talk, I will introduce the current state-of-the-art generation-based conversational AI approaches that leverage large pre-trained language models. I will discuss the challenges and shortcomings of these models such as the lack of knowledge, consistency, empathy, etc. I will highlight our current work in improving the depth of generation-based ConvAI, and possible directions for future research. I will also discuss potential ethical challenges of conversational AI systems and current efforts to address them.

Bio:

Professor Pascale Fung is the Director of the multidisciplinary Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE) at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is a Professor of Electronic & Computer Engineering, and Computer Science & Engineering.  She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)  and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association. She is an early pioneer of using statistical modelling and machine learning for natural language processing, an important area in AI. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Organizational Governance of AI Working Group and the Partnership on AI. She is board member and past president of the ACL SIGDAT, past editor-in-chief of Computer Speech and Language, and past associated editor of TACL, IEEE TASLP, etc. She has been technical chair of ACL, EMNLP, ICASSP. She is an expert on the Global Future Council of the World Economic Forum. She has been invited as an AI expert to different government initiatives in China, Japan, the UAE, India, the European Union and the United Nations. She received the 2017 Outstanding Woman Professional award from the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Prof. Fung obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University and speaks seven Asian and European languages.