Chatbots Track at the Deep Learning Summit London 2016 schedule

Scott is an online editor at Techworld and Computerworld UK. He writes about disruptive technology, enterprise IT and UK startups, with an eye on how technology is changing the way we live and work.

Deprecating the state machine: bridging dialogue research and production systems

Despite a large body of research on machine learning-based dialogue systems, most virtual assistants, chatbots, and voice apps in production are still implemented using a state machine and a set of rules. Alan will talk about how Rasa ships products based on its applied AI research, and how these open source tools are enabling a large developer community to benefit from the power and flexibility of ML-based dialogue.

Alan is co-founder and CTO of Rasa, the leading open source conversational AI company. Rasa builds software that enables developers to build conversational software that really works, and is trusted by thousands of developers in enterprises worldwide, including UBS, ERGO, and Helvetia. Rasa combines cutting-edge research with enterprise-ready technology. Alan holds a PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge and has years of experience building AI-powered products in industry.

Humana ex Machina: Delivering positive human experiences in chatbots

Dr Chris Brauer, Director of Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London presents research findings from mixed methods project including subject-matter-expert interviews, quantitative survey, auto-ethnography, experience sampling, co-creation and customer experience trials.

Dr Chris Brauer is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the MSc Management of Innovation programme and the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies (CAST) in the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Chris was formerly a journalist and a programmer and his research interests are in the intersections of emerging technologies and social life, psychology, economics, and culture.

Building an AI friend

Chatbots should have empathy. They need to have the ability to identify the user’s emotions from the conversation, to detect how emotions evolve over time, and to understand the user’s emotional needs. Artem will talk about how chatbots can simulate emotional connection with users using different modalities, including text, speech, and vision, and how we can use deep learning to build the best friend for a human.

Artem Rodichev is a Head of AI at Luka, a company that is best known for its recent app called Replika - an AI friend for emotional growth and awareness. Artem earned M.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Moscow State University. Before Luka, he worked at top Russian IT companies such as Yandex, Mail.ru, and ABBYY developing NLP-driven products. Artem's area of research interest includes Conversational AI and Deep Learning techniques for modeling human conversation.

Artificial Intelligence & ChatBot Applications in Pharma

Hari Radhakrishnan and Josh Mesout from AstraZeneca will provide an overview of the CTO office and how they are exploring new, future technologies, showcasing how they can have an impact in real business challenges of today. An overview of how we are exploring the space of artificial intelligence, chat bots and conversational UI frameworks, working towards tools for both internal and external audiences. Hari will provide details of some prototypes developed and summarize opportunities where AstraZeneca are keen to leverage for Chabot's in healthcare in the next few years. These range from contextually aware healthcare solutions to internal helpdesk improvements, whilst of course complying with the complex regulatory environment in pharmaceuticals. Hear more about the areas that AstraZeneca are looking for emerging technologies in this exciting new field.

Hari works as an Associate architect in the Tech Incubation Labs (Chief Technology Office) of AstraZeneca. His work ranges from working on Big Data tools, Machine Learning, IOT, prototyping (hardware/ software), scouting and adopting new technologies for AstraZeneca. He is currently based in Cambridge and his team is involved in setting up a Tech lab space for AstraZeneca. Always open to new ideas and new ways of thinking, that will help pave the way forward for AstraZeneca in delivering life saving drugs to patients quicker.

Artificial Intelligence & ChatBot Applications in Pharma

Hari Radhakrishnan and Josh Mesout from AstraZeneca will provide an overview of the CTO office and how they are exploring new, future technologies, showcasing how they can have an impact in real business challenges of today. An overview of how we are exploring the space of artificial intelligence, chat bots and conversational UI frameworks, working towards tools for both internal and external audiences. Hari will provide details of some prototypes developed and summarize opportunities where AstraZeneca are keen to leverage for Chabot's in healthcare in the next few years. These range from contextually aware healthcare solutions to internal helpdesk improvements, whilst of course complying with the complex regulatory environment in pharmaceuticals. Hear more about the areas that AstraZeneca are looking for emerging technologies in this exciting new field.

Josh works as a Technology Scout in AstraZenecas Technology Incubation Lab (Chief Technology Office). His work involves scouting innovative technologies and rapidly developing prototypes and proof of concepts to help push the boundaries of technology within the Pharmaceutical industry. Josh’s main areas of interest are Machine Learning, Big Data, Digital Health, VR & AR, IOT, NLP, Sentiment Analysis and conversational UI. Josh is currently based in Cambridge and is always interested in discussing new opportunities and technologies.

The transformation of digital customer service

Since 2005 Inbenta has been leveraging Natural Language Processing for business and connecting users with the information they require. Through a combination of AI and computational linguistics Inbenta is able to deploy a unique user experience for each project. With the ultimate goal of enabling total comprehension of human natural language by machine, Inbenta is now positioned at the vanguard of AI powered Chatbots to deliver the next step in automation and online experience; Machines that no longer merely recognize your intentions, but which engage in intelligent dialogue and are capable of collecting data and performing tasks.

A graduate of the University of Paul Valéry (Montpellier III) he previously worked with technology giant HP before making the jump to software. Since joining Inbenta in 2015 he helps companies to increase their efficiency and implement a multi channel intelligent search experience for self-service, customer support, Call & Support Centres, Live Chat, Virtual Chat, E-commerce and Social Media platforms by using Artificial Intelligence & Natural Language Processing technology.

Making chatbots functional, fun and fit for purpose.

As a way to explore natural language services and chatbots, we at rehabstudio gave ourselves a week to make an educational tool that lets children ask questions to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Three months later we had Tina the T. Rex, a Facebook Messenger bot for National Geographic Kids. In the process we learned a lot about the scope and limitations of commercial natural language services, the intricacies and difficulties of language and conversation, and that what children want to learn isn’t always aligned with what you want to teach them.

Peter Gasston is the senior creative technologist at +rehabstudio, a digital marketing & product agency specialising in new and disruptive technology with offices in London, New York, Belfast and San Francisco, and clients including Google, Facebook, and Diageo. He has sixteen years experience working on the web and in digital, at agency, startup and corporate levels. He has written for Net magazine, A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, and is the author of two books: The Book of CSS3 and The Modern Web.

Your.MD: Revolutionising pre-primary care access via chatbot

Matteo Berlucchi will delve into the process of building an artificial medical brain that is capable of finding the most likely cause of an indisposition. Through a set of intelligent algorithms, based on a doctors’ thought process, Your.MD is capable of reaching a comparable result to a doctor when given the same information -  totally personalised to fit an individual's history, profile and current situation. Matteo will address the fundamental components that make this possible: a medical knowledge base, a chat-based interface, a medical AI brain and a safe platform to store individualised structural medical data.

Matteo Berlucchi is CEO at Your.MD - the world’s first Personal Health Assistant to combine Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and content from the NHS to deliver free, personalised health information to a global audience. As one of the first Internet entrepreneurs in Europe, Berlucchi has spent his career building and growing companies and services operating across the online and mobile sectors. Prior to Your.MD, Berlucchi has served as Chief Digital Officer at Northern & Shell, founder and CEO of the ‘social ebook’ platform aNobii, as well as the first live news platform on iPhone, Livestation, and Skinkers, an award-winning digital communication platform. Berlucchi has also served as an advisor to multiple individuals and businesses.

Believable Virtual Suspects – Virtual Humans that Role-Play as a Suspect in a Practise Police Interview

A virtual character that behaves as a human can be used to train people in social interactions. For example a virtual agent that plays the role of a suspect in practice police interviews can be used by students of the police academy to hone their interrogation skills. Creating a virtual character that behaves as a human is a challenge we approach by looking at how humans behave in this situation. We find psychological concepts and theories that explains the behaviour of humans and use these to create a behaviour selection model for the virtual character. The result is a virtual character, a virtual suspect, that behaves in a believable and (anti)social manner.

Merijn Bruijnes is a researcher at the Human Media Interaction group in the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He works on building virtual humans that can be used in a social skills training program. Other research interests include the everyday use of tele-presence robotics, and using augmented or virtual reality technology to change the experience of food and beverages. Merijn holds an M.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics and will defend his PhD thesis in October.

Helping students chat their way to a college degree

In the US, most students who apply to college fail to earn a degree. Students who struggle often come from underserved communities and often lack adequate college guidance. To address this need, AdmitHub developed a chatbot, named Oli, that gathers data, sends reminders, and answers questions in a personalized way at scale. The average user exchanges fifty messages per month with Oli on their path to and through college. Andrew Magliozzi, AdmitHub's technical co-founder, will share insight into AdmitHub's technical architecture, data pipeline, and experience integrating a chatbot into the highly personal environment of college counseling.

Andrew Magliozzi has dedicated his career to developing technology to help students succeed. Before founding AdmitHub in 2014, he founded and ran Signet Education (2005) and also established a non-profit organization with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Andrew has an undergraduate degree from Harvard College '05 and also attended Hack Reactor '13. In his spare time, Andrew practices the ancient art of Italian Yoga.

The automated insurance agent and leveraging neuroeconomics at SPIXII

Neuroeconomics use all kinds of research methods and experimentations to understand human behavior in different situations. One of these situations is making decisions under risk and uncertainty, where multiple areas of the brain become involved. Neuroscientific research suggests that we humans are not rational beings. Much of our decision making is driven by emotion. That’s fine when making a coffee order, but what about when making an important financial decision? Do we want our emotion to play a part? More and more, technologies like SPIXII are using neuroeconomics findings to help us. In this presentation, we walk through a use case of chatbots in the insurance space drawing from the experience at SPIXII, the automated insurance agent. It becomes essential to see how technology will be emotionally intelligent in the future. It’s this emotional intelligence that’ll help make engagement with humans more responsive and persuasive.

Patrick Fagan is a consumer psychologist who applies scientific research to business insight. He lectures at Goldsmiths and UAL and has published papers on topics from Facebook psychology to price psychology, and he has published a book with Pearson, #Hooked: Why cute sells... and other marketing magic we can't resist. Patrick has consulted and run experiments for brands including eBay, Trainline and Vodafone, and is currently Head of Emotion Sciences at the emotional AI company CrowdEmotion.

Recruitment: Can Chatbots Find More Suitable Candidates Than Humans Can?

Developments in artificial intelligence technology has given rise to a spectrum of intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) and smart advisors that act in an autonomous manner and provide a new means to deliver and enhance customer service. Cyra, a smart AI based recruiting assistant, is using the principals of intelligent virtual assistants, machine learning and natural language processing to disrupt the existing recruitment industry that has been inefficient, costly and laborious for ages. Cyra is providing employers a new approach to recruitment by helping them hire exactly the candidates they are looking for and assisting them to automate their hiring workflow. Sheenu will give us an overview of Cyra and the fundamental components that have been used to make Cyra your next generation recruiting assistant.

Sheenu Chawla is a serial entrepreneur and CEO at Cyra.ai – “your smart personal recruiter” that combines machine learning and natural language processing to deliver a new approach to recruitment for the global start up community. Currently, she is also pursuing her MBA from Imperial Business School while continually looking out for the next market opportunity.

A data-driven approach to build your future bot FRIEND

In the near future,everyone will have some bot friends. Building a bot friend is not only a technical challenge but also an editorial challenge. My session will be about how Poncho team leverage machine learning and NLP technology to build a bot that is not only useful but has strong emotional connections with people as well.

Kuan Huang is the founder of Poncho, a New York based company that makes weather fun again. Poncho is among the first few bots launched on Facebook Messenger at F8 2016. Since then, Poncho has been covered by almost every major media in US and numerous international media. Poncho started as a weather service that pushes sassy weather and commute updates to people at the time they request. Recently, Poncho starts expanding to other daily content vertical.

Niall has an Electronic Engineering Masters from Nottingham University and an MBA from Oxford University. His career spans Technology Finance and Entrepreneurship. He has worked for big brands such as Barclays Global Investors and BlackRock and in the Consulting sphere for Deloitte and Alpha Financial Markets Consulting.

Which verticals will be disrupted next by chat bots?

We’ve all heard and read about the huge potential of chat bots, the fails (justified or not) and some good examples. What’s missing is a framework to evaluate the potential of verticals which could be next in line in the automation and bot revolution, considering the current state of technology and the (new) requirements of the chat interface. Luc will offer an analysis of the technologies used by chat bot ventures and share a more nuanced framework of which verticals are most likely to be disrupted next by chat bots.

Luc Dudler is the Founder and CEO of Job Pal. He is fascinated by the opportunity chat bots can have on messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, etc. With experience in the recruiting industry he founded Job Pal - the world’s first recruiting chat bot. Since his Economics studies he has been involved in the tech industry. Prior to Job Pal he’s been working at Somewhere, Project A Ventures and Absolventa.

PJ is the CTO & Co-founder of Aiden.ai, the business analyst chatbot for data driven professionals (stealth mode). PJ is a serial tech entrepreneur with a product and engineering background. He started his career as a software engineer developing digital audio systems and DSP algorithms for the music industry. This lead him to join Apple in product marketing, where he worked on some of the most successful products of the past fifteen years, including iPod, iPad, Siri etc. Before starting Aiden.ai, PJ founded and coded Timista, VC Flair, Games of Angels and Forereads. Featured in Product Hunt, TechCrunch, Apple’s Best New Apps.

Dr Tania Peitzker-Lingham has been nurturing and investing in British startup, velmai, from its incubator stage to a monetised global roll out with its current "go to market" strategy. As she will tell you - and has captured in her postdoc ebook on the subject - Artificially Intelligent (chat)bots have had a rocky path in their many decades of evolution. velmai [Virtual Empirical Lifeforms with Multifunctional Artificial Intelligence] is about to launch globally with its full scale website reporter AI bot on an international tech news platform in San Francisco (media embargo until the release in October), followed by an online market researcher AI botlaunching from New York and London in January 2017. And in the case of velmais, they have had to wait till the market was ready for them! As one of our launch partners Kik Interactive sums it up in 2016, which they call "The Year of the Bots": "first there were websites, then there were apps, now there are bots".

Dale Beaumont is the founder and CEO of BRiN, the world’s first business advisor powered by artificial intelligence. Available via a smart-phone app, his goal is to provide personalised education and human-like support to every business owner on the planet all at the same time. Before turning his hand to technology Dale was a leading business advisor in Australasia. He trained over 50,000 business owners and published 16-books, which collectively sold over 250,000 copies. Dale’s main areas of expertise include; Lead Generation, Marketing ChatBots, Public Relations, App Store Optimisation (ASO), Video Advertising and The Future of Education.

Ashley is a Senior Dev Evangelist for IBM Watson based in Austin, Texas. She is a former Product Manager for the IBM Watson Developer Cloud and focused on their API offerings. She is interested in machine learning, AI, natural language processing and other awesome technologies. Ashley’s previous experience as a front-end dev and UX designer continue to influence her decision-making today.