After reviewing work on these representative systems, he will describe research directions aimed at embedding representation, inference, and learning under uncertainty more deeply into the fabric of operating systems and applications. Eric Horvitz is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he manages the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group. He received his PhD from Stanford University, focusing in his doctoral work on representations and reasoning about time-critical action. Wireless access to the internet has emerged as a huge opportunity, driving a great deal of technology development and infrastructure investment. One of the biggest limitations, thus far, when accessing the web from small, mobile devices has been the user interface.
Keyboards are impractical for small devices, and pointing and clicking has limited expressive power.
Speech technology is emerging as a core piece of the user interface for wireless web access. This talk will describe the design of the user interface for Voyager, Nuance's voice browser. Michael Cohen cofounded Nuance Communications in 1994. Previously he was at SRI's Speech Technology and Research Lab, leading projects in acoustic modeling and combining speech recognition and natural language understanding into spoken language understanding systems. At Nuance, Mike leads the efforts in advanced dialog research and voice user interface design for Nuance products.