Now ready for a new training event, we would love to tell you about our first in-person meet-up. The Edinburgh Training event happened in the middle of April and the city welcomed us with timid blossoms and early signs of spring.
Marvel fans will probably chuckle at this imaginary mini talk between Iron Man and his AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. Since the birth of modern computers, many movies have used artificial intelligence characters such as HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rachael in Blade Runner (1982) and Samantha in Her (2013) to depict futures where humans live together with smart machines. Undoubtedly, language intelligence is at the heart of any human-like AI system that people use to augment their capabilities or even to socialize with, like a friend.
Picture this. You are walking down a busy street when you get a text message from a close friend. It’s a funny message, so you respond immediately, and the two of you engage in a fun back-and-forth. You are so absorbed in the conversation that, when it’s time to cross the street, you don’t even think to check if any cars are coming. As soon as you step into the street, a fast bus passes in front of you loudly honking . Fortunately, you are safe and sound, but the scare that you got certainly made you look up from your phone. You feel your heart pounding,your hands sweating. Someone stops to ask if you’re okay and they notice how large your pupils look.
Doing research needs reading and writing, but often academics struggle to find time for that. I suggest a few pieces my colleagues and I have enjoyed reading lately to re-claim time for pure research in the academic workspace.
When you scroll through the projects listed on the Cobra website, one word seems to pop up frequently: alignment. What does this mean, and why is it interesting? Let’s first look at a scenario everyone has experienced: you are in a room full of people. Somebody yawns. Within a few minutes, everybody seems to be...
Last week the ESRs, along with their supervisors, met the Project Officer for the midterm review of the COBRA project. We had the opportunity to show our progress, at a personal and a scientific level. Overall, both the senior and the early career researchers were satisfied by what came up during the meeting. All the...
The language sciences shed light on the intricate processes that govern and underlie our ability to speak. This blog post in turn sheds light on the language sciences.
Around four months ago, researchers from Aix Marseille University invited us – the CoBra ESRs – to participate in the European Performing Science Night in Badalona, Spain. This night was part of a Europe-wide event that gave us the chance to talk about Cobra with the public, as well as a chance to collect data....
By now, most people have probably interacted with conversational agents through a device, a chatbot or an interactive voice response like when you are told to hold on the call when placing a call to a bank. Conversational agents, also known as dialogue systems, have risen in popularity over the past few years through the...
Between June 21st and 24th the second COBRA training event took place—which we affectionately insist on referring to as the Marseille event, even though it once again could not take place physically, now at Aix-Marseille University. Most of the event was dedicated to courses given by COBRA’s senior researchers. In his lectures Computational Models of...
