Human communication has become increasingly reliant on systems made and managed by large technology companies like Google, Apple, Twitter, and Meta (formerly Facebook). These systems offer people many benefits, but they also present new challenges for society. In recent years, researchers, lawmakers, and journalists have suggested that large technology companies...
Task-oriented conversational systems are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by the rise of conversational recommendation systems across multiple platforms (e.g., Google Home, Alexa, and Siri) and domains (e.g., local establishments, e-commerce, books, music, and movies). However, users are still largely limited in what preferences they can express and how, as...
Task-oriented conversational systems are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by the rise of conversational recommendation systems across multiple platforms (e.g., Google Home, Alexa, and Siri) and domains (e.g., local establishments, e-commerce, books, music, and movies). However, users are still largely limited in what preferences they can express and how, as...
Search engines and social media are two ubiquitous modes of accessing Web information, and they dictate what information people view, influencing their thoughts and beliefs and potentially shaping their opinions about news and facts. Network effects propagate the beliefs, often magnified, disseminating information rapidly and leaving little time for fact...
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
Imagine sitting in a room listening to some friends play a song. Perhaps one friend is playing guitar, another playing bass, and a third is playing drums. The musical content in this scene is extraordinarily complex, yet it contains many types of structure that is easy for us to comprehend....
Data Science and related fields like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Statistics provide indispensable research methods for understanding a wide variety of phenomena from large datasets. However, as methodical and empirical as these methods aim to be, there are many subjective and discretionary choices that the data scientist must make...
The task of classification has been increasingly attracting attention from researchers in recent years. The objective is to assign labels given attributes of samples. The classification task is practical in real-world applications and is widely explored in fields such as computer vision, natural language processing and information retrieval. The recent...
Sound is one of the most important mediums to understand the environment around us. Identifying a sound event in prerecorded audio (such as a police siren, a dog bark, or a creaking door in soundscapes) leads to a better understanding of the context where the sound events occurred. To do...
Modeling human language is at the very frontier of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Statistical language models are probabilistic models that assign probabilities to sequences of words. For example, topic models are frequently used text-mining tools to organize a vast set of unstructured documents by exploring their theme structure. More...