Ensuring that everyone is understood — I have been working on conversational AI with large language models (like GPT-4) for many years. The recent huge burst in popularity due to chatGPT is very exciting, but how can they be improved? There are many answers to that question of course, but in this article I will focus…

Five Years of PhD Discussions at YRRSDS and SIGdial — If you don’t want to read the whole article, you can skim read the best bits. They are formatted like these two sentences to highlight them throughout. New areas of interest crop up in conversational AI, while others fade from discussion. In order to analyse the early research trends, I…

Answering Textual Questions from Packaging — This is a streamlined abridgment of a paper that I co-authored with the whole team detailed below, published at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2021. If you ever need, please do cite our paper entitled “Am I Allergic to This? Assisting Sight Impaired People in the Kitchen.” Harvard: Ramil Brick…

Providing Usable Answers to Spatial Visual Questions — This is a streamlined abridgment of a paper that I co-authored with the whole team detailed below, published at the Reasoning and Interaction Conference 2021. If you ever need, please do cite, our paper is entitled “The Spoon is in the Sink: Assisting Visually Impaired People in the Kitchen.” Harvard: Baker…

What We Learned at the European and African Summits in 2021 — Edinburgh, Scotland is a hub of conversational AI - littered with startups, labs, established businesses, and University departments focused on the topic. As an industry-funded Conversational AI PhD Researcher, I was approached by Sydney to help organise the European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit in Edinburgh. Of course, the event…

Both Academic Research, and Implementation in Industry and the Public Sector — On the 12th of October I hosted the 7th meetup of the Scottish Linked Data Interest Group, otherwise known as SLiDInG 7. SLiDInG 7 was supported by The Scottish Government and SICSA Data Science, and organised by Wallscope and Heriot-Watt’s Semantic Web Lab (SWeL). We brought industry, academia, and…

Combining RDFox and Wallscope’s Platform — In 2012, the BBC famously used linked data to support coverage of the London Olympics on its website, app, and interactive video player. They have continued to champion the benefits of semantic technologies to this day. Coincidentally, as I started to write this, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were planned to…

Improving the Accessibility of Voice Assistants: Doing Things Right — This is a streamlined abridgement of my paper with Pierre Albert, published at LREC’s Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies 2020. If you use any of this guide in your research, please do cite our paper titled “Ethically Collecting Multi-Modal Spontaneous Conversations with People that have…

Can you read my… — Introduction Every single one of us will intermittently try to conjure the right word for a given moment, pausing mid-sentence to try and remember it. For example, forgetting the name of a place caused this hesitation: “He was at that coffee shop on the corner called umm… Peppers” We can all…