THE FUTURE IS HERE

Conversational Agents: Chatbots to Humanoids | Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aida Mustapha | TEDxAPUKL

The need for conversational agents rise to support natural interfaces for ambient technologies such as the autonomous car, smart homes, consumer electronics including the mobile phones, clothings and many others. Because the devices used for ambient intelligence are usually small, low power, low weight, and more importantly low cost, an embedded speech ability that is practical for implementation as constrained by system usage is highly sought after. Existing implementation of whether speech-based or text-based dialogue systems are primarily developed upon natural language processing technology such as natural language understanding, dialogue management, and natural language generation. It is often tied to a specific domain to manage the dialogue management and information database. However, rather than a rigid architecture, the driving key to future ambient application development should capitalize on the concept of agency, hence the autonomous capability. Aida received her B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Michigan Technological University and Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from UPM focusing on dialogue systems. At present, she is serving UTHM as the Deputy Director for Research Grant Management at the Research Management Center. She has published more than 150 refereed publications in the area of Soft Computing, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Computational Linguistics and Software Agents. Her main passion is pursuing the area of Computational Linguistics; special interests include natural language understanding, ontology, dialogue systems, and application of natural language processing to holy texts, in particular the Quran. She has supervised more than 15 Phd students and involved in more than 2 million worth of research projects. She is also a certified hypnotherapist. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx