Dr Ruhi Sarikaya

During the last decade, there has been remarkable progress both in conversational AI technology and its adoption by hundreds of millions of users. As conversational AI is penetrating into users’ lives at an amazing rate throughout their day and whereabouts, the complexity of the problem is also increasing. These systems interpret users’ natural language requests contextually, provide contextually and personally relevant answers, continuously learn from its mistakes and adapt to the user, and expand its coverage and scope. In this talk, we will give an overview of Intelligent conversational AI systems, how they work and key components powering them. 

Biography:

Ruhi Sarikaya has been a Director at Amazon Alexa since 2016. He built and is leading the Intelligence Decisions organization within Alexa AI at Amazon. With his team, he has been building core AI capabilities around ranking, relevance, natural language understanding, dialog management, contextual understanding, proactive recommendations, personalization, self-learning, metrics and analytics for Alexa. Prior to that, he was a principal science manager and the founder of the language understanding and dialog systems group at Microsoft between 2011 and 2016. His group has built the language understanding and dialog management capabilities of Cortana, Xbox One, and the underlying platform. Before Microsoft, he was a research staff member and team lead in the Human Language Technologies Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for ten years. Prior to IBM, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at University of Colorado at Boulder for two years.  He received his BS degree from Bilkent University, MS degree from Clemson University, and Ph.D. degree from Duke University, all in electrical and computer engineering.  He has published over 130 technical papers in refereed journal and conference proceedings and is the inventor of over 85 issued/pending patents (h-index=50). Dr. Sarikaya has served in the IEEE SLTC, the general co-chair of IEEE SLT’12, publicity chair of IEEE ASRU’05, and associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing and IEEE Signal Processing Letters. He was named IEEE SPS Distinguished Industry Speaker. He has been giving keynotes in major AI, Web and language technology conferences. Dr. Sarikaya is an IEEE Fellow.