Customer-obsessed science

Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. Alexa Prize was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent and engaging open-domain dialogs. In the second iteration of the competition in 2018, university teams advanced the state of the art by using context in dialog models,

Goal-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on components specifically developed for a single task or domain. This limits such systems in two different ways: If there is an update in the task domain, the dialogue system usually needs to be updated or completely re-trained. It is also harder to extend such dialogue systems to different and multiple domains. The dialogue state tracker in conventional dialogue

Recommendation systems have developed beyond simple matrix factorization to focus on two important sources of information: the temporal order of events (Hidasi et al., 2015) and side (e.g., spatial) information encoded in user and item features (Rendle, 2012). However, state-of-art temporal modeling is often limited by model capacity for long user histories. In addition, meta data are rarely used in generic

The end-to-end nature of neural machine translation (NMT) removes many ways of manually guiding the translation process that were available in older paradigms. Recent work, however, has introduced a new capability: lexically constrained or guided decoding, a modification to beam search that forces the inclusion of pre-specified words and phrases in the output. However, while theoretically sound, existing

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a well-studied problem in Artificial Intelligence that can be solved quickly in practice when using simplified agent assumptions. However, real-world applications, such as warehouse automation, require physical robots to function over long time horizons without collisions. We present an execution framework that can use existing single-shot MAPF planners and ensures robust execution in the presence of unknown or time-varying higher-order dynamic limits, unforeseen robot slow-downs, and unpredictable obstacle appearances.