Communicating with machines is becoming pervasive to the point we rely entirely on them to find (vital) information over the web, perform on-line (trans)actions and communicate with people speaking different languages. In the last decade we have seen tremendous research and technology advancement in the speech and text based interfaces. We are now faced with the problem of overcoming their limitations and investigate multimodal input, adaptive interfaces, communicative paradigms and tame task complexity. In this talk we discuss research towards third-generation conversational interfaces.
Prof. Riccardi received his
Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering and Master in Information
Technology,
in 1991, from the University of Padua and CEFRIEL Research Center,
respectively. From
1990-1993 he collaborated with Alcatel-Telettra Research Laboratories (Milan,
Italy).
In 1995 he received his Phd in Electrical Engineering from the
Department of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Padua, Italy.
From 1993-2005, he worked first at AT&T
Bell Laboratories and then AT&T
Labs-Research where he worked in the Speech and Language Processing
Lab. In
2005 joined the faculty of Engineering
at University of Trento (Italy) and is affiliated with the
interdisciplinary Department of Information and
Communication Technology and Center
for Mind/Brain Sciences.
He is the Director of the Adaptive Multimodal Information and
Interfaces (AMI2) Lab.
Prof. Riccardi's research
on stochastic finite state machines for speech and language processing
has been
applied to a wide range of domains for task automation. He participated
at the
creation of the state-of-the-art AT&T spoken language system
used in the
1994 DARPA ATIS evaluation. He and his colleagues have been pioneering
the
speech and language research in spontaneous speech for the well-known
"How
May I Help You?" research program which led to breakthrough speech
services. His research on learning
finite state automata and transducers has lead to the creation of the
first
large scale finite state chain decoding for machine translation ( "Anuvaad"
).
Prof. Riccardi has
co-authored more than 80 papers and 25 patents in the field of speech
processing, speech recognition, understanding and machine translation.
His
current research interests are language modelling and acquisition,
language
understanding, spoken/multimodal dialog, affective interfaces, machine
learning
and machine translation.
Prof. Riccardi has been on
the scientific committee of EUROSPEECH, INTERSPEECH, ICASSP, NAACL and
ACL. He
has co-organized the IEEE ASRU Workshop in 1993, 1999 and
2001. He has
been the Guest Editor of the IEEE Special Issue on Speech-to-Speech
Machine
Translation. He is on the Editorial
Board of the ACM Transactions of Speech and Language. He is elected
member of
the IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee (2005-2008). Prof. Riccardi is
senior
member of IEEE, ACL and New York Academy of Science.
Prof.
Riccardi have received many national and international awards and more
recently
the Marie Curie Research
Excellence grant by the European
Commission.