Advances in Question Answering Research for Personal Assistants

Dear all,

Summer is over, beergardens become less of an ideal option to mingle, so why not move back into digital space? And what better way to do this than keeping abreast with the latest developments in Data Science? This time we are very pleased to have Alessandro Moschitti joining us (live from the West Coast!) to tell us all about question-answering and digial assistants. What a great way to start the autumn ...

Come along and join us (online)!
Udo, David & Bernd

P.S.: More details to follow ...

P.P.S.: As always, if you would like to give a 5-minute lightning talk, then do step forward ...

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Speaker:
Alessandro Moschitti (Principal Applied Research Scientist, Amazon Alexa) https://www.linkedin.com/in/alessandro-moschitti-10999a4/

Title:
Advances in Question Answering Research for Personal Assistants

Bio:
Alessandro Moschitti is a Principal Applied Research Scientist of Amazon Alexa leading the research on retrieval-based QA systems (since 2018), and a professor of the CS Dept. of the University of Trento, Italy (since 2007). He obtained his Ph.D. in CS from the University of Rome in 2003. He was a Principal Scientist of the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) for 5 years (2013-2018), and worked as a research fellow at The University of Texas at Dallas for 2 years (2002-2004). He was (i) a visiting professor for the Universities of Columbia, Colorado, John Hopkins, and MIT (CSAIL department); and (ii) a visiting researcher for the IBM Watson Research center (participating at the Jeopardy! Challenge 2009-2011). His expertise concerns theoretical and applied machine learning in the areas of NLP, IR and Data Mining. He has devised innovative structural kernels and neural networks for advanced syntactic/semantic processing and inference over text, documented by about 300 scientific articles. He has received four IBM Faculty Awards, one Google Faculty Award, and five best paper awards. He has led about 25 projects, e.g., MIT CSAIL and QCRI joint projects, and European projects. He was the General Chair of EMNLP 2014, a PC co-chair of CoNLL 2015, and has had a chair role in more than 50 conferences and workshops. He has been an action editor of TACL, and currently he is an action/associate editor of ACM Computing Survey and JAIR, and in the editorial board of MLJ and JNLE.