Name: Language: From the brain to machines
Start: 2018-05-15T
End: 2018-05-15T
Location: Frankenstein Bar

Talking machines such as Alexa are incredibly complex artificial intelligence.How can we translate the complexity of Human conversations into an algorithm? How smart are those programs actually? Can we teach them so they become even smarter? Can a machine understand the subtle nuances of the wording of a poem and translate it? Can it be creative? Come for a walk (and a drink!) through the fantastic world of language processing and generation.

Can you be friends with a smart speaker device?

Dr. Ondrej Dusek (Post doctoral researcher in School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences)

Smart speakers and voice assistants in your phone by Google, Amazon, Apple and others are the latest must-have tech toy. You can just ask for a lot of things – music, news, calendars – and they’ll do their best to help. How are they built and how smart are they? And can you have a friendly conversation with them? Ondrej will talk about voice assistants and especially about his experience in trying to teach them how to chat. Ondrej is co-advising the Heriot-Watt University team in the Amazon Alexa Prize chatbot competition, which reached the finals as the only UK team and finished 3rd last year

When will Google Translate learn to translate poetry?

Dr. Adam Lopez (Reader in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation)

Google Translate works for over one hundred human languages… but not always very well. Will it ever be able to translate poetry? To answer this speculative question, I’ll have to tell you something about how Google Translate works, in this playful talk spanning language, creativity, and silicon brains.

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