Inclusive and Natural: Making AI Work for Everyone; with Bill Byrne et al; BayCHI Program

November 14, 2023
baychi.org/cal...
Bill Byrne, Google, Lily Clifford, Rime, Corey Miller, Rev, and Mary Constance Parks, Moderator
Original Announcement
This panel of experienced speech technologists will consider the question of how to make conversational interactions with computers work for everyone. The focus will be on human needs in real world applications.
Bill Byrne is a staff research scientist at Google working on LLM-based applications. His current interests and projects focus on building task-based dialog and multimodal AI solutions that incorporate fine-tuning, function calling, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and various techniques for prompt engineering. He's also done extensive work on dialog data creation pipelines resulting in large task-based training datasets. Bill held previous positions at General Magic, SAP Labs, Santa Clara University, and Stanford. He received his PhD in linguistics from UC San Diego in 1998.
Lily Clifford is a co-founder and CEO of Rime, focused on building highly flexible text-to-speech tooling for customer-facing enterprise technology use cases in conversational AI. Prior to founding Rime, she was a PhD student in Stanford's NLP group, where her research focused on the intersection of computational speech processing and sociophonetic variation.
Corey Miller is ASR Research Manager at Rev. He studied linguistics and Romance languages at Harvard and did a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked in a range of speech and language technologies, focusing principally on speech synthesis and recognition, with a central emphasis on language and linguistic issues. Corey worked at a range of institutions including Nuance, MITRE, and the University of Maryland. Corey is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University where he offers a course on speech technology.
Our moderator, Mary Constance Parks, is co-owner and consultant at Park Presidio Productions. She is an applied linguist and interaction designer specializing in voice, multimodal, and conversational experiences. She has worked both in-house and as a consultant on speech and language technology systems, products, and applications for consumers and workers. Past clients include Facebook, Walmart, Ueno, Honeywell, Nuance, Verizon, Aetna, PayPal, and startups and government agencies. She is currently working on side projects, some in physical theater.