Dr. Ruhi Sarikaya of Alexa AI, Amazon

In this lecture, Dr. Ruhi Sarikaya will explore the driving forces behind the GenAI revolution and how they are shaping the path toward AGI in the coming decade. Specifically, the challenges and recent progress will be reviewed in the conversational and ambient intelligence field, focusing on how users engage with these systems in increasingly personalized and rich context—such as short- and long-term discourse, spatial awareness, temporal factors, device types, and input/output modalities. Additionally, Dr. Ruhi Sarikaya will share his perspective on navigating this exciting journey toward a future, where AI systems not only catch up to but potentially exceed human performance in sensory input understanding and cognition.

Biography:

Ruhi Sarikaya is a Vice President at Amazon. He is leading the Conversational Assistant Services (namely Alexa AI) organization in Alexa. With his team, he has been building LLM based 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 joining Amazon, 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 90 issued/pending patents. 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 and is an IEEE Fellow. He is serving on the advisory board of several engineering departments and universities.