Integrative AI

  • Dan Bohus, Eric Horvitz, and Larry Zitnick | Microsoft, Microsoft Research

Over the last 15 years, significant advances have been made in inference and decision making under uncertainty, machine learning, vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and dialog. Supported by these advances, efforts to develop end-to-end intelligent systems that integrate multiple competencies and act in the open world have brought into focus new research challenges. Interesting opportunities arise at the confluence of traditional AI fields, for instance between computer vision and natural language processing. The science of engineering larger, integrated systems that are efficient, robust, transparent, and maintainable is still very much in its infancy. The speakers in this session will provide a sampler of research challenges, from work at the intersection of vision and language, to situated dialogue systems and interactive robots, and highlight opportunities in integrative AI. The session will be followed by a panel discussion.

Speaker Details

“Eric Horvitz is serving as the managing director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond, balancing lab-wide responsibilities with ongoing research on machine intelligence and on opportunities to leverage the complementarities of human and machine intelligence. Visit his home page.

His ongoing research builds on representations of probability and utility, and centers on identifying ideal actions under uncertainty and bounded informational, computational, and cognitive resources. Beyond curiosity-driven research on foundations of machine perception, learning, and reasoning, he has been excited about building real-world systems that provide value to people, organizations, and society, working in multiple areas, including human-computer interaction, information retrieval, healthcare, transportation, operating systems, and aerospace.

See the Microsoft Research home page as a starting point for browsing through projects, events, and people and contact information for the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond—and other Microsoft labs in the United States and throughout the world. ”

Dan Bohus is a Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. The central question that drives his long term research agenda is: how can we develop systems that naturally embed interaction and computation deeply into the flow of everyday tasks, activities, and collaborations? In the last few years Dan’s work has focused on developing computational models for multiparty engagement, turn taking, interaction planning, and on addressing the challenges in inference and decision making that such models bring to the fore. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dan obtained his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where he investigated problems of dialog management and error handling in speech interfaces.

C. Lawrence Zitnick is a principal researcher in the Interactive Visual Media group at Microsoft Research, and is an affiliate associate professor at the University of Washington. He is interested in a broad range of topics related to visual object recognition, language and artificial intelligence. He developed the PhotoDNA technology used by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and various law enforcement agencies to combat illegal imagery on the web. Before joining Microsoft Research, he received the PhD degree in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003.

Series: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit