Skip down to main content

Oxford Lecture: What Will A Companionable Internet Agent Be Like?

Date & Time:
17:00:00 - 18:30:00,
Monday 12 July, 2010

About

The lecture begins by looking at the state of the art in modeling realistic conversation with computers over the last 40 years. The talk argues that there has been real progress, even though some systems of the late 1960s were remarkably good, a fact largely forgotten now.

I then move on to ask what we would want in a conversational agent that was designed for a long-term relationship with a user, rather than the carrying out of a single brief task, like buying a railway ticket. Such an agent I shall call ‘companionable’ and I shall distinguish several functions for such agents, but the feature they share will be that, in some definable sense, an artificial Companion should know a great deal about its owner – derived both from conversation and from the internet itself – and can use that information.

For this lecture, it will not be important what form, robotic or otherwise, a Companion has and I shall not focus on developments in speech understanding and generation but just assume the state of the art. The focus will be, first, on the technical issues of what such a Companion should know and how it can gain and use such knowledge though the understanding of conversations and searching the internet; and, secondly, on what the social implications of such Companions will be: will we trust them, will a Government or their manufacturer demand access to what they know about us, will they talk to each other about us, and what will happen to their unique knowledge of us when we die?

Data Dump to delete

Speakers

  • Professor Yorick Wilks
  • Name: Professor Yorick Wilks
  • Affiliation: Oxford Internet Institute
  • Role:
  • URL: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=31
  • Bio:

Papers

Privacy Overview
Oxford Internet Institute

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies
  • moove_gdrp_popup -  a cookie that saves your preferences for cookie settings. Without this cookie, the screen offering you cookie options will appear on every page you visit.

This cookie remains on your computer for 365 days, but you can adjust your preferences at any time by clicking on the "Cookie settings" link in the website footer.

Please note that if you visit the Oxford University website, any cookies you accept there will appear on our site here too, this being a subdomain. To control them, you must change your cookie preferences on the main University website.

Google Analytics

This website uses Google Tags and Google Analytics to collect anonymised information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Keeping these cookies enabled helps the OII improve our website.

Enabling this option will allow cookies from:

  • Google Analytics - tracking visits to the ox.ac.uk and oii.ox.ac.uk domains

These cookies will remain on your website for 365 days, but you can edit your cookie preferences at any time via the "Cookie Settings" button in the website footer.