Online NLP Meetup Series #2 - 🎁 Christmas edition 🎁

Agenda:

19:00 - Welcome from the organizers
19:10 - "In Search of Best Practices for NLP Projects" by Ivan Bilan (TrustYou)
19:30 - "Genie, An Open-Source Toolkit for High Quality, Affordable Virtual Assistants" by Giovanni Campagna (Stanford OVAL)
19:50 - "Conversational Privacy: How can chatbots and speech assistants communicate privacy?" by Birgit Brüggemeier (Fraunhofer IIS)
20:10 - Hangout

Topic summaries:

"In Search of Best Practices for NLP Projects" by Ivan Bilan
In this talk, we are going to explore the best practices for building NLP and ML projects from the ground-up and up to production. What does it mean to build a prototype? Do I really need CI/CD for my NLP projects? What does my team need to know to work on NLP Projects? Anything we can learn and use from ML and DataOps best practices? How to stay on top of recent NLP developments? These and many more questions we will explore and discuss together.

"Genie, An Open-Source Toolkit for High Quality, Affordable Virtual Assistants" by Giovanni Campagna
Virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa are a fast
growing market. In this talk, I will introduce Genie, our open-source
tools that allow companies and communities to build virtual assistants,
reducing the reliance on large companies and improving privacy. Genie
uses neural semantic parsing to translate natural language to the
ThingTalk programming language we designed for this purpose. We
introduce synthesis to reduce the data acquisition cost. Results on
several benchmarks show that Genie is effective for complex questions
and task-oriented dialogues, at a fraction of the cost of the
alternatives.

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Following up on the positive feedback we received for our first iteration, we've been busy planning the second edition of our Natural Language Processing (NLP) Meetup Series; this time with a little bit of Christmas flair. As for our previous meetup, we are powered by the Center for Digital Technology and Management (www.cdtm.de) in our home city of Munich and thank them for their gracious support. Like last time, we will be using a fellow CDTM alum's startup for the hangout portion of the evening: Knit (knitplaces.com).

This festive evening will take place on Wednesday, December 9th at 19:00 CET / 10:00 PST.

The meetup is a recurring event series that brings together students, start-ups, corporations, researchers and tech enthusiasts, to talk about the latest and newest in the field of natural language processing. A lot of community members are active in the field and we aim to give them a space to share their insights, research, ideas and have a good time in the process.

Like last time, we will meet fully online. The meetup consists of two main sections: presentations by field experts, followed by a more relaxed "hangout" afterwards -bring your mulled wine and sit next to the fire!

And as always, feel free to reach out at any point if you have any questions or comments - I'm available under arturo@knowron.com.

Location: Online
Date: Wednesday, December 9th
Time: 19:00 CET / 10:00 PST