Date: Friday, May 14, 2004
Time: 1:00 P.M. - 2:00 P.M.
Room: Steinman Hall, Room T-512
Speaker: Dr. Mazin Rahim, AT&T Labs - Research, Murray Hill, New Jersey
Interactive spoken dialog systems have recently evolved to a point where it is becoming possible to automate a variety of customer care and help desk services with reasonable success. These services not only generate cost savings for call centers but also the promise of improved user satisfaction as compared to laborious touch-tone IVR systems. In this talk, I will describe the main technical innovations in this area and present a new generation of automated agents that utilize our algorithmic advances in areas of speech and language processing as well as machine learning and data mining to (a) enable humans and machines to interact in a more open and natural language dialog, (b) learn, self-improve and adapt from data with minimal human intervention, (c) scale efficiently and with limited resources, and (d) track trends and capture critical business information to help enhance call center operation.
Dr. Rahim is the Director of the Natural Language Division at AT&T Labs-Research. The major focus of his division is the advancement of AT&T's core technologies in areas of speech and language processing as well as dialog and multimodal user interfaces. Dr. Rahim is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is currently the Chair of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee and the Chair of the CAIP Industrial Board at Rutgers University.