Dean's Speaker Seminar:Towards General Purpose Task Completion Agents
Speaker: Prof. Emine Yılmaz, Department of Computer Science, University College London
Title: Towards General Purpose Task Completion Agents
Abstract: Intelligent assistants and search engines are commonly being used to complete complex tasks. Hence, systems that can provide users with contextual task completion assistance with as little input from the user as possible are needed. In this talk, I will present our research in devising general purpose task completion agents. I will first start with the research we have done in incorporating information about users’ tasks and needs to search engine design. I will then describe how we have built upon this work to design conversational systems that can provide general purpose task completion assistance.
Bio: Emine Yilmaz is a Professor and ELLIS Fellow at University College London (UCL), Department of Computer Science. At UCL she is a member of the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where she leads the Web Intelligence Group. She also works as an Amazon Scholar for Amazon, and is a co-founder of Humanloop, a UCL spinout company. Professor Yilmaz’s research interests lie in the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing. She has received several awards for her research, including the Karen Sparck Jones Award, a Google Faculty Research Award and a Bloomberg Data Science Research Award. Her research has been funded by several funding bodies including EU Horizon 2020, EPSRC, Alan Turing Institute, Elsevier, Google and Bloomberg.
