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Events for January 17, 2019
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CS Colloquium: Zhou Yu (UC Davis) - Grounding Reinforcement Learning with Real-World Dialog Applications
Thu, Jan 17, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhou Yu, UC Davis
Talk Title: Grounding Reinforcement Learning with Real-World Dialog Applications
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Recently with the wide-spread of conversational devices, more and more people started to realize the importance of dialog research. However, some of them are still living in a simulated world, using simulated data such as Facebook bAbl. In this talk, we emphasize that dialog research needs to be grounded with the users' real need. We introduce three user-centered task-oriented dialog systems that are trained by reinforcement learning algorithms. The first system is a dialog systems that utilized reinforcement learning to interleave social conversation and task conversation to promote movies more effectively. The second system is a sentiment adaptive bus information search system. It uses
sentiment as immediate reward to help the end-to-end RL dialog
framework to converge faster and better. The trained dialog policy will also have a user friendly effect. It would adapt to user's sentiment when choosing dialog action templates. For example, the policy will pick template that provides more detailed instructions when user is being negative. This is extremely useful for customer service dialog systems where users frequently get angry. The third system is a task-oriented visual dialog systems. It uses a hierarchical reinforcement learning to track multimodal dialog states
and decide among sub tasks of whether to ask more information or just give an answer. Such system can complete the task more successfully and effectively. We are conducting a further experiment to deploy the system as a shopping assistant.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department in UC Davis. She received her PhD in the Language Technology Institute under School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. She was recently featured in Forbes as 2018 30 under 30 in Science. Her team won Amazon Alexa Prize 2018 with $500,000 award. (https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize) She as also received research awards and gifts from various companies, such as Intel, Tencent, Cisco and Bosh.
Host: Fei Sha
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Resume Lab - Bring your Laptop!
Thu, Jan 17, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Labs are an activity where you can work on your resume in the presence of a career advisor to get tips on the spot.
Bring your Laptop!
For more information about Labs & Open Forums, please visit viterbicareers.usc.edu/workshops.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
