Past Events

18 November 2019 | The Graduate Center of CUNY 

Speaker: Will Hall, Chief Creative Officer at RAIN 

Talk Title: The Distorted Crystal Ball & the Future of Voice Design   Voice and emerging interfaces are fundamentally changing humanity's relationship with technology. And as designers, we must help create this new world. This talk will look at how emerging technologies are evolving in China, and how these principles are shaping interactions all over the world.

Bio: At RAIN https://rain.agency/ , Will has helped pioneer the emerging world of Voice and Conversational AI. He serves on multiple boards around design and emerging technologies, including Google’s Agency Council for Voice. Over the past 15 years, his work has been recognized by the One Show, Cannes Lions, Nickelodeon’s Kid Choice Awards and AIGA’s 365 for top clients like Nike, Facebook, Sony, Adult Swim and Alibaba to name a few. His mom still has no idea what he does.

Will shared:
- The five principles of voice design
- How children are evolving due to conversational interfaces
- Case studies (Starbucks, Nike, HBO, Headspace and others)
- Informed predictions

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22 May 2018 | The Graduate Center of CUNY 

Speakers: Roberto Sicconi, CTO of TeleLingo & Maggie Stys, CEO of TeleLingo

Talk Title: Eyetracking Driver Attention with Interactive Safety Alerts   

Bio: Dr. Ing. Sicconi managed the Advanced Embedded Speech team at IBM Research that developed the 1st in-car Conversational Navigation and Infotainment system, in collaboration with Honda, Alpine and later with Magneti Marelli and BMW. He subsequently took the role of IBM’s Watson Program Director, 1st computer to beat human champions at Jeopardy! He has been responsible for starting the Watson for Health initiative, and Watson’s Customer Engagement Advisor digital assistant, now core activities of a 5,000 people division at IBM. His expertise spans across Speech, Image/Video Processing, Dialog Management, NLP, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Connected Vehicles, Wireless Communications, Healthcare, Financial Services, Customer Support, Education, Mobile Computing and Virtual Assistants. 

Roberto has been operating in the startup world since 2013 as cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer at Infermedica.com. As founder and CTO at TeleLingo, he is currently focused on commercialization of Dreyev, an interactive driving safety system (Dreyev.com). 

Bio: Dr. Styś is an accomplished technologist with focus on Intelligent Conversational Machines. Over the last two decades, she has been leading high tech initiatives across industry and technology partners. At IBM Watson Research, she has designed, implemented and patented work in Natural Language Processing, Dialog Systems, Information Management, Discourse Analysis and Machine Translation. Working at the convergence of new business and cutting edge technology, her IBM career spanned four divisions, including Sales and CIO where she built up Innovation Teams across India, China, Vietnam and the US. An entrepreneur at heart, Maggie is passionate about disruptive technologies, new business models and emerging markets. She is founder and CEO at TeleLingo, currently on a mission to save lives of drivers by modeling their attention to prevent distracted driving accidents (Dreyev.com).

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2 June 2016 | The Graduate Center of CUNY Linguistics Program and IBM

Speaker: David Nahamoo, Speech CTO & Strategist, IBM Research

Talk Title: Watson Developer Cloud: A Platform for Cognitive Solutions 

Bio: Dr. Nahamoo is an IBM Fellow. He is currently responsible for the development of conversational dialog technologies and services for IBM Watson Group. From 2006 to 2014, he was responsible for IBM Research technical and business strategy for speech technologies. From 1993 to 2006, he was responsible for delivering speech technologies for IBM’s speech products and services.

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Speaker: Nava Shaked, CUNY GC and HIT, Israel (Holon Institute of Technology)

Talk title: Multimodal Conversational Agents (Avatars & Virtual Agents)

Bio: Dr. Shaked is an expert in AI applications, NLP (Natural Language Processing), as well as Call Centre optimization technologies. Shaked held senior management positions with IBM and several other large IT organizations and has been involved in leading major projects in Israel and the US for more than 20 years. Shaked holds a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from CUNY GC, New York where she currently a Visiting Professor and she is a member of the Engineering Faculty in HIT, Israel.

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21 May 2015 | Wearable Computing and ramifications for speech interfaces

Speaker: Dr. Michael Johnston, Lead Inventive Scientist, Interactions Corporation
Talk Title: Scaling up Virtual Assistants for Enterprise
The first generation of virtual assistants focused on easy access to a range of different device capabilities (e.g. calls, messaging, calendar, search …).

Speaker: Raj Tumuluri, Principal of Context-aware Multimodal Technologies, OpenStream Inc.
Talk Title: Virtual-assistant as interface for mobile-apps of future
The number of mobile apps that consumers need to access everyday worldwide has increased to such a level that in-out navigation and login-chaos, lack of cross-app work-flows and unified notification mechanisms have led to poor user adoption.

20 May 2014 | Wearable Computing and ramifications for speech interfaces

Speakers: Maryam Ashoori, Tanya Kraljic, PhD, and Courtney Kellner

A system is discussed in which a person may use a smart Cellular (Mobile) Telephone, a PDA or any other handheld computer as an authentication mechanism to make a purchase or conduct any other transaction which requires authentication, such as any financial transaction, any access control (to account information, etc.), and any physical access scenario such as doubling for a passport or an access key to a restricted area (office, vault, etc.). It may also be used to conduct remote transactions such as those conducted on the Internet (E-Commerce, account access, etc.). In the process, a multi-factor authentication is used. The discussed system may be used in the absence of a central network connection, only using a local network.

8  October 2013 | Mobile Device Transaction Using Multi-Factor Authentication

Presenter: Dr. Homayoon Beigi, President, Recognition Technologies, Inc.

A system is discussed in which a person may use a smart Cellular (Mobile) Telephone, a PDA or any other handheld computer as an authentication mechanism to make a purchase or conduct any other transaction which requires authentication, such as any financial transaction, any access control (to account information, etc.), and any physical access scenario such as doubling for a passport or an access key to a restricted area (office, vault, etc.). It may also be used to conduct remote transactions such as those conducted on the Internet (E-Commerce, account access, etc.). In the process, a multi-factor authentication is used. The discussed system may be used in the absence of a central network connection, only using a local network.

12 March 2013 | Panel: When the User is the Buyer

Panelists: Bruce Balentine, Jonathan Bloom, Sara Basson

The primary application for speech recognition today is Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Extant principles of VUI design that have emerged from IVR development put severe constraints on a dialogue designer’s options. This is because IVR users are victims who did not buy or choose to use the technology. The appearance of speech on user-owned devices like smartphones and tablets changes everything. This will be an interactive design philosophy discussion. The goal is to facilitate a hearty discussion that allows us to make friends with the new paradigm of designing for users who need and want to use speech.

26 February 2010 | Mobile Voice and the Enterprise

Panelists: Bill Meisel, Peter Marshall, Amit Nanavati, and Bruce Balentine
Moderator: Sara Basson

The proliferation of mobile phones – particularly smartphones – changes the way we do business. We can engage with services on-the-go, without being tethered to a computer. Speech interfaces become more critical for mobile devices, given small keyboards and screens. This has launched the concept of “Voice Sites” – voice-only or voice-primary methods to access information. There are now billions of mobile devices in use, many of these in emerging markets like India and China. How does prolific access to web information change business in emerging markets? How does access to “mobile voice” change existing businesses and their information delivery models?

17 June 2009 | Mini Voice Search

Presenters: Michael Greene and Roberto Pieraccini

A “mini Voice Search” event featuring “local talent” that presented at the Mobile Voice Conference (co-sponsored by AVIOS) held in San Diego in February 2009.

28 March 2008

Presenters: Elaine Cascio and Murray Spiegel

Elaine Cascio: How to Create a Compelling Customer Experience
Murray Spiegel: Overcoming the Difficulties of Names

3 December 2007

Presenters: John Giese, Unified Communications

Talk Title: “Please…Bumper Sticker it for Me”

26 June 2007

Presenters: Dr. Phil Shinn and Dr. Harry Baldinger

Dr.Phil Shinn will introduce and demonstrate an open-source speech application design toolkit, The VUID Toolbox.

Dr. Harry Baldinger is a podiatrist, and also runs a company providing a web-based EMR (electronic medical records) and PM (practice management) to physicians of all specialties.

7 August 2006 | Local Chapter Summit

28 March 2006

Presenters: Elaine Cascio and Murray Spiegel

Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. Good service isn’t enough anymore – companies need to truly differentiate themselves through clear strategy that drives the customer experience. Many companies don’t give much thought to the importance of having the IVR, contact center, retail locations, website, kiosks, advertising, written materials and correspondence match the overall company brand, image and values. We’ll look at ways to create a consistent experience no matter how customers contact you, some examples of good – and not so good – customer experiences, and the role speech plays in enhancing the customer experience.

8 December 2005

Presenters: Dr. James Maisel and Shelli Feigenbaum

Shelli Feigenbaum: Pacific Gas and Electric- How Speech in the call center improved customer satisfaction, caller take rate and first call resolution.

26 September 2005

Presenter: David Lubensky

Talk Title: Conversation with Virtual Agents in the Contact Center

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3 June 2005

Presentation: Speech Technology: Transcription, Captioning, and Beyond

This meeting included overviews on speech technology status and vision from IBM researchers, and presentations from universities and museums that are using speech recognition technologies to create accessible user environments. Proceedings available, based on stenographic transcription.

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