New Prospects for Artificial Personal Assistants with Clayton Lewis, University of Colorado Boulder
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2022-06-15

https://baychi.org/calendar/20220614/

Language-model based artificial intelligence, for example the Codex system, may be creating new possibilities for supporting people with cognitive disabilities.  First, such systems have greater capabilities in interactive task learning, that is, in learning how to perform tasks from verbal instructions, than previous approaches.  This is important for some use cases.  Second, these systems may offer advances over previous approaches in supporting flexible, responsive conversation, something likely to be important in many personal assistance applications.  At the same time, current language-model based systems have significant limitations, including lack of episodic memory, that is, the ability to record ongoing events.  Clayton will describe the new possibilities, the limitations, and the prospects for further progress.

Clayton Lewis is professor of Computer Science and a fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.  He is known for his research on evaluation methods in user interface design.  He helped create the thinking aloud method and the cognitive walkthrough, in regular use in software development.  He has also contributed to cognitive assistive technology, programming language design, educational technology, and cognitive theory in causal attribution and learning.  He has served as technical program chair for ACM CHI and serves on the editorial board for *Human-Computer Interaction*.  He was named University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholar and served as Computer Science department chair from 1999 to 2003.

Lewis earned an AB in mathematics from Princeton University, an MS from MIT in mathematics and linguistics, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in experimental psychology.  He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2009, recognizing his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.  In 2011 he recieved the ACM CHI Social Impact Award.  Lewis  works with the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation, helping to develop an initiative on cloud computing for people with disabilities.