Pryon delivers enterprise-grade AI solutions that transform how you develop and maximize relationships with your customers, employees, and partners. Existing implementations as seen in consumer AI experiences lack the accuracy and security required for interacting with enterprise knowledge.
Author: mmeteer
Spring 2018 Seminar Presentations
Here’s a summary from the Spring 2018 Seminar Series
Beyond Direct Command-Based Natural Language Interactions with Robots
Matthias Scheutz
Tufts University
Friday, April 20
A main goal of human-robot interaction research is to make human-robot interactions as natural as possible. Critically, this includes natural language (NL) interactions, even though NL capabilities were traditionally either not included at all in robotic architectures or at best restricted to simple command-based interfaces.
In this presentation, I will provide an overview of our recent architectural and empirical work in NL-based human-robot interaction, with focus on the pragmatic aspects of situated NL understanding and generation. In addition to video demonstrations showing our algorithms at work, I will also present results from human subject experiments that hint at the complex interplay between linguistic and non- linguistic aspects of human-robot interactions.
Bio: Matthias Scheutz received degrees in philosophy (M.A. 1989, Ph.D. 1995) and formal logic (M.S. 1993) from the University of Vienna and in computer engineering (M.S. 1993) from the Vienna University of Technology (1993) in Austria. He also received the joint Ph.D. in cognitive science and computer science from Indiana University in 1999. Matthias is currently a full professor of computer and cognitive science in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University, and Senior Gordon Faculty Fellow in the School of Engineering at Tufts where he also directs the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory. He has over 300 peer-reviewed publications in artificial intelligence, artificial life, agent-based computing, natural language processing, cognitive modeling, robotics, human-robot interaction and foundations of cognitive science. His current research and teaching interests include multi-scale agent-based models of social behavior and complex cognitive and affective autonomous robots with natural language and ethical reasoning capabilities for natural human-robot interaction.
Variability in input: a corpus study of discourse markers in immigrant parents’ speech.
Professor Sophia Malamud
Friday, April 13
We focus on the input properties in the bilingual acquisition of two Russian expressions (namely, aa and mm), extending the line of research that treats disfluencies not as performance errors irrelevant to the study of grammar, but as part of native speakers’ linguistic competence (Bell et al. 2003; Erker & Bruso 2017; Ginzburg et al. 2014 inter alia). Using the audio-aligned corpus of monolingual and bilingual child-directed and child speech in Russia, Germany and the U.S., which is being constructed by the authors of the study (BiRCh Corpus), the paper discusses the range of functions these words can serve in Russian and presents evidence of differences between the monolingual and bilingual parents in their use of these words.
Alexa Spoken Language Understanding
Andy Rosenbaum
Friday, March 23
Alexa is the groundbreaking cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo and other devices designed around your voice. Our mission is to push the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Audio Signal Processing, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers. In this seminar, I’ll give an overview of the science and technology that powers Alexa Spoken Language Understanding.
Bio: Andy Rosenbaum graduated from the Brandeis Computational Linguistics MA program in 2014. He works on Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, and Natural Language Understanding for Amazon Alexa.
What can be Accomplished with the State of the Art in Information Extraction?
Ralph Weischedel, Senior Scientist,
Information Sciences Institute
Friday, March 2 at 3:30
We present three deployed applications where information extraction is being used, and note the common features of those applications that have already led to success. Thus, the state of the art is proving valuable for some applications. We also identify key research challenges whose solution seems essential for further successes. Since a few practical deployments already exist and since breakthroughs on particular challenges would greatly broaden the technology’s deployment, further research will yield even greater value.
Dr. Ralph Weischedel, a Senior Supervising Computer Scientist and Research Team Lead at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, has diverse experience in Natural Language Processing and its application to Government needs. For over 30 years, he has led text understanding research, focusing on statistical learning algorithms. He has more than 120 papers, three patents, and a best paper award from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Machine Translation. He is a Fellow of the ACL, a distinction held by barely more than 1% of ACL members. He has served as principal investigator on diverse efforts.
NOTE: Dr. Weishedel is from ISI’s Waltham Office, where they are looking for both CL and CS interns and new grads. ISI will also be at the Industry Reception on the 28th.
Question Answering R&D at Microsoft
TJ Hazen, Microsoft Research
Friday, February 9
Natural language processing technology for open ended question answering tasks is now readily available to anyone with internet access using web sites such as Bing or Google. This talk will present a general overview of how question answering inside of Microsoft Bing works and discuss techniques used to expand and improve Bing’s question answering capabilities. The talk will also discuss recent advances in deep learning modeling techniques to perform open ended machine reading comprehension and question answering tasks.
TJ Hazen is a Principal Research Manager with Microsoft Research where his current work is focused on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and question answering. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2013, TJ was a Research Scientist at MIT where he spent six years as a member of the Human Language Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and nine years as a Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. TJ holds S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
Translation Divergence between Chinese-English Machine Translation:
An Empirical Investigation
Nianwen Xue
Friday, February 2
Alignment is an important part of building a parallel corpus that is useful for both linguistic analysis and NLP applications. We propose a hierarchical alignment scheme where word-level and phrase-level alignments are carefully coordinated to eliminate conflicts and redundancies. Using a parallel Chinese-English Treebank annotated with this scheme we show that some high-profile translation divergences that motivate previous research are actually very rare in our data, whereas other translation divergences that have previously received little attention actually exist in large quantities. We also show that translation divergences can to a large extent be captured by the syntax-based translation rules extracted from the parallel treebank, a result that supports the contention that semantic representations may be impractical and unnecessary to bridge translation divergences in Chinese-English MT.
Nianwen Xue is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Language & Linguistics Program at Brandeis University. He has devoted substantial efforts to developing linguistically annotated resources for natural language processing purposes. The other thread of his research involves using statistical and machine learning techniques to solve natural language processing problems. His research has received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IARPA and DARPA. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), and he also serves on the editorial boards of Language Resources and Evaluation , and Lingua Sinica. He is currently the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect of Sighan, an ACL special interest group in Chinese language processing.
Can we Produce Multilingual NLP Workbenches for DH Researchers? Report on the LitText Experiment
Andrew U. Frank
TU Wien, Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation frank@geoinfo.tuwien.ac.at
Tuesday, January 16
Many researchers in the Digital Humanities are mining corpora of natural language texts in several languages; they would be helped with an NLP work- bench to process the text and annotate them for querying. NLP support for many languages is available; the impediment is “only” the integration.
LitText is an experiment to build a workbench to advance a Computational Comparative Literary study. It is work in progress and demonstrates current difficulties. The workbench proposes a three step process to the DH researcher:
1. Collect the text and prepare them for NLP processing; each text is a file and metadata is included with a simple and extensible markup language.
2. Process the text with NLP tools and convert the result to RDF triples.
3. Build the corpus in a triple store and query with SPARQL.
Current state:
• Use of Stanford coreNLP with support for English, German, French, Spanish and tint for Italian, each as a server at a specific URL.
• Coding of POS is somewhat uniform, but NER includes surprises and UD is certainly a step in the right direction.
• Translation of NLP output (XML) to RDF triples is currently preserving structure and encoding.
• Triple stores (we use Jena and Fuseki) seem fast enough.
• SPARQL is very flexible and likely to be difficult for DH researchers.
Mobile Heartbeat
Mobile Heartbeat™ uses secure smartphones and secure texting to improve clinical workflow, team communications, and deliver better patient care at a lower cost. The Mobile Heartbeat solution consolidates clinical communications, patient information, and lab data, with HIPAA texting, voice, and photography. Based on Clinical Urgent Response (CURE)™ technology, Mobile Heartbeat provides a real-time clinical team directory and workflow capability that efficiently connects all members of the patients’ care team. Eliminating the need for multiple devices, searching for caregivers or hunting for lab data, Mobile Heartbeat CURE (MH-CURE) provides a highly efficient, patient-specific, clinical team collaboration solution.
Tibco
Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices around the world including in Waltham, MA, TIBCO Software empowers businesses to their digital destinations by interconnecting everything in real time and providing augmented intelligence for everyone, from business users to data scientists. With more than 10,000 customers, 3,500 employees located in over 30 countries, TIBCO has retained the speed and agility of a start-up. We value and encourage new ideas, direct communication, out-of-the-box thinking, risk-taking and creative problem-solving. We’re looking for people who want to make a difference doing a job they love – dynamic individuals willing to take the risks necessary to make big ideas come to life and who are comfortable collaborating in our creative, new-idea-driven environment. We value hard work and provide new opportunities to grow, learn, and excel.
Digital Lumens
Digital Lumens designs, manufactures, sells, and services intelligent building systems for industrial space around the world. We replace older lighting technology with energy efficient solid state lighting, often reducing the energy cost of lighting by 90%. The connected lighting system provides control of task lighting, and collects data on energy usage, occupancy, and environmental conditions. Once the facility is covered by this wireless sensor mesh, we add sensors specific to the customer’s industry, providing real-time measurement of temperature and relative humidity, hazardous gases, and other factors which affect both production and safety. Our customers use this data to inform critical business and process decisions.
CL Industry Meet’n’Greet Reception February 28
Our Spring Industry Reception will be Wednesday, February 28 from 3-5 pm. It’s a great opportunity to talk with technical people from area companies about what they are doing as well as what opportunities they have for interns and new employees.
Companies attending:
Basis
Jibo
Mobile Heartbeat
Digital Lumens
Tibco
Dr. Ralph Weischedel to present March 2
Language Technologies Seminar Series
What can be Accomplished with the State of the Art in Information Extraction?
Ralph Weischedel, Senior Scientist
Information Sciences Institute
Friday, March 2 at 3:30
GZang. 124
We present three deployed applications where information extraction is being used, and note the common features of those applications that have already led to success. Thus, the state of the art is proving valuable for some applications. We also identify key research challenges whose solution seems essential for further successes. Since a few practical deployments already exist and since breakthroughs on particular challenges would greatly broaden the technology’s deployment, further research will yield even greater value.
Dr. Ralph Weischedel, a Senior Supervising Computer Scientist and Research Team Lead at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, has diverse experience in Natural Language Processing and its application to Government needs. For over 30 years, he has led text understanding research, focusing on statistical learning algorithms. He has more than 120 papers, three patents, and a best paper award from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Machine Translation. He is a Fellow of the ACL, a distinction held by barely more than 1% of ACL members. He has served as principal investigator on diverse efforts.
NOTE: Dr. Weishedel is from ISI’s Waltham Office, where they are looking for both CL and CS interns and new grads. ISI will also be at the Industry Reception on the 28th.
TJ Hazen from Microsoft Research presents February 9
Language Technology Seminar Series
Question Answering R&D at Microsoft
TJ Hazen, Microsoft Research
Friday, February 9 at 3:30
Volen 101
Natural language processing technology for open ended question answering tasks is now readily available to anyone with internet access using web sites such as Bing or Google. This talk will present a general overview of how question answering inside of Microsoft Bing works and discuss techniques used to expand and improve Bing’s question answering capabilities. The talk will also discuss recent advances in deep learning modeling techniques to perform open ended machine reading comprehension and question answering tasks.
TJ Hazen is a Principal Research Manager with Microsoft Research where his current work is focused on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and question answering. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2013, TJ was a Research Scientist at MIT where he spent six years as a member of the Human Language Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and nine years as a Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. TJ holds S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
Professor Xue presents at CL Seminar Feb 2
Translation Divergence between Chinese-English Machine Translation: An Empirical Investigation
Nianwen Xue
Friday, February 2 at 3:30pm
Volen 101
Alignment is an important part of building a parallel corpus that is useful for both linguistic analysis and NLP applications. We propose a hierarchical alignment scheme where word-level and phrase-level alignments are carefully coordinated to eliminate conflicts and redundancies. Using a parallel Chinese-English Treebank annotated with this scheme we show that some high-profile translation divergences that motivate previous research are actually very rare in our data, whereas other translation divergences that have previously received little attention actually exist in large quantities. We also show that translation divergences can to a large extent be captured by the syntax-based translation rules extracted from the parallel treebank, a result that supports the contention that semantic representations may be impractical and unnecessary to bridge translation divergences in Chinese-English MT.
Nianwen Xue is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Language & Linguistics Program at Brandeis University. He has devoted substantial efforts to developing linguistically annotated resources for natural language processing purposes. The other thread of his research involves using statistical and machine learning techniques to solve natural language processing problems. His research has received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IARPA and DARPA. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), and he also serves on the editorial boards of Language Resources and Evaluation , and Lingua Sinica. He is currently the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect of Sighan, an ACL special interest group in Chinese language processing.
Jibo, the first social robot for the home
The Brandeis CL Seminar Series hosts Jibo:
Roberto Pieraccini, Head of Conversational Technologies, Jibo Inc.
Friday, December 1, 3pm, Volen 101
Jibo is a robot that understands speech and sees. He has a moving body that complements his verbal communication and expresses his emotions, cameras and microphones to make sense of the world around him. He detects where sounds come from and can track and recognize people’s faces. He has a display to show images, an eye that follows you, and touch sensors. With this array of technologies, Jibo encompasses the ultimate human-machine interface.
In this talk we will give an overview of the technological complexity we embarked into when, more than 4 years ago, we started the journey of building the first consumer social robot. We will describe some of the solutions we adopted and give a demo of the product that started shipping a few weeks ago. We will conclude with a discussion on the future challenges for short and long-term research.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Roberto Pieraccini, a scientist, technologist, and the author of “The Voice in the Machine,” (MIT Press, 2012) has been at the forefront of speech, language, and machine learning innovation for more than 30 years. He is widely known as a pioneer in the fields of statistical natural language understanding and machine learning for automatic dialog systems, and their practical application to industrial solutions. As a researcher he worked at CSELT (Italy), Bell laboratories, AT&T Labs, and IBM T.J. Watson. He led the dialog technology team at SpeechWorks Int.l, he was the CTO of SpeechCycle, and the CEO of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. He now leads the Conversational Technologies team at Jibo. http://robertopieraccini.com
Justin Su from QPID talks about Machine Learning in Healthcare
Machine Learning Approaches to Evaluate Clinical Evidence Quality
Justin Su
NLP/ML Engineer, QPID
Friday, November 10 at 3:00
Volen 101
The Data Science team at QPID has conducted a machine learning project to develop an approach that decides which request for a medical procedure are clinically appropriate based on clinical information from the patient’s medical record provided by a human user. In this talk, I will present and compare various machine learning and deep learning models that we have experimented to identify supportive clinical evidence for a given procedure.
Justin Su graduated from the CL MA program at Brandeis in 2017, and joined QPID Health as an NLP/ML Engineer. He does a bit of everything at QPID, which includes software engineering, NLP, machine learning, data science, and baking.
Harry Bunt: Issues in the semantic annotation of quantification
Harry Bunt
Professor of Language and Artificial Intelligence
Tilburg University
Thursday Oct. 26 at 3:30
Volen 101
Quantification is ubiquitous in natural language: it occurs in every sentence. It occurs whenever a predicate P is applied to a set S of objects, where it gives rise to such questions as (1) To how many members of S is P applied? (2) Is P applied to individual members of S, or to S as a whole, or to certain subsets of S? (3) What is the size of S? (4) How is S determined by lexical, syntactic and contextual information? Moreover, if P is applied to combinations of members from different sets, issues of relative scope arise.
Quantification is a complex phenomenon, both from a semantic point of view and because of the complexity of the relation between the syntax and the semantics of quantification, and has been studied extensively by logicians, linguistics, and computational semanticists. Nowadays it is generally agreed that quantifier expressions in natural language are noun phrases, which is why quantification arises in every sentence.
The International Organization for Standardization ISO has in recent years started to develop annotation schemes for semantic phenomena, both in support of linguistic research in semantics and for building semantically more advanced NLP systems. The ISO-TimeML scheme (ISO 24617-1), based on Pustejovsky’s TimeML, was the first ISO standard that was established in this area; others concern the annotation of dialogue acts, discourse relations, semantic roles, and spatial information. Quantification is currently considered as a next candidate for an ISO standard annotation scheme. In this talk I will discuss some of the issues involved in developing such an annotation scheme, including the definition of an abstract syntax of the annotations, of concrete XML representations, and the semantics of the annotations.
Harry Bunt is professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Before that he worked at Philips Research Labs. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Utrecht and obtained a doctorate (cum laude) in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. His main areas of interest are computational semantics and pragmatics, especially in relation to (spoken) dialogue. He developed a framework for dialogue analysis called Dynamic Interpretation Theory, which has been the basis of an international standard for dialogue annotation (ISO 24617-2).
CL Seminar: Lexicography from Scratch
Lexicography from Scratch: Quantifying meaning descriptions with feature engineering
Orion Montoya
Friday, October 20 at 3pm
Volen 101
When computational linguistics wishes to engage with the meaning of words, it asks the experts: lexicographers, who analyze evidence of usage and then record judgments in dictionaries, in the form of definitions. A definition is a finely-wrought piece of natural language, whose nuances are as elusive to computational processes as any other unstructured data. Computational linguists nevertheless squeeze as much utility as they can out of dictionaries of every stripe, from Webster’s 1913 to Wordnet. None of these resources had computational analysis of lexical meaning in mind when they were conceived or created. Despite the immense human cognitive effort that went into making them, most lexical resources constrain their computational users to a few simplistic lookup tasks.
If a lexical resource is designed, from its origins, to serve all the diverse human and computational applications for which dictionaries have been repurposed in the digital era, it might yield significant improvements both theoretically and practically. But who wants to make a dictionary from scratch? The theme of the 2017 Electronic Lexicography conference (Leiden, September 19-21: http://elex.link/elex2017/) was “Lexicography From Scratch”. This talk assembles a number of isolated recent innovations in lexicographical practice — often corpus-driven retrofits on to existing dictionary data — and attempts to map out a lexicographical process that would connect them all.
Such a process would yield meaning descriptions that are quantified, linked to corpus data, decomposable into individual semantic factors, and conducive to insightful comparison of lexicalized concepts in pairs and in groups. We describe a cluster-analysis framework that shows promise for automating the fussier parts of this by reducing cognitive loads on the lexical analyst. If aspects of lexical analysis can be automated through feature engineering, we may produce computational models of lexical meaning that are more useful for NLP tasks and more maintanable by lexicographers.
Bio: Orion Montoya graduated from the Brandeis CL MA program in 2017, with the thesis Lexicography as feature engineering: automatic discovery of distinguishing semantic factors for synonyms. Before coming to Brandeis, he spent fifteen years in and around the lexicography industry, computing with lexical data in all of its manifestations: digitizing old print dictionaries, managing lexicographical corpora, linking old lexical data to new corpus data. He also has a BA in Classics from the University of Chicago.
Fidelity
Fidelity is one of the world’s largest financial services firms. Over the years, our commitment to innovation and pioneering approach to customer service has helped us grow our business and expand our reach. As of June 30, 2016, Fidelity administered over $5.4 trillion in total customer assets. Headquartered in Boston, additional operations centers are staffed with over 18,000 customer service representatives in eleven states and 193 Investor Centers are spread across the United States. In 2014 Fidelity received the JD Powers award for full-service investor satisfaction. Fidelity has several strategic projects in cognitive computing to assist representatives in servicing customers and improving our self-service channels. For more corporate information see jobs.fidelity.com. Fidelity is one of the world’s largest financial services firms. Over the years, our commitment to innovation and pioneering approach to customer service has helped us grow our business and expand our reach. As of June 30, 2016, Fidelity administered over $5.4 trillion in total customer assets. Headquartered in Boston, additional operations centers are staffed with over 18,000 customer service representatives in eleven states and 193 Investor Centers are spread across the United States. In 2014 Fidelity received the JD Powers award for full-service investor satisfaction. Fidelity has several strategic projects in cognitive computing to assist representatives in servicing customers and improving our self-service channels. For more corporate information see jobs.fidelity.com.
Homesite
Homesite is committed to being the most trusted and valued customer- driven insurance company. Homesite is experiencing outstanding growth. Homesite was built on: Integrity, Respect, and striving for excellence. These values when combined with discipline and focus will lead success. We’re experts in homeowners, renters and condo insurance. It’s all we do. That’s why we’re really good at tailoring all of our products and services to your needs. Here at Homesite, your home is our focus.
The Experimentation Lab was formed in order to foster technology innovation, agility, and rapid development. The Experimentation Lab is a place to establish thought leadership backed by tactical and strategic projects/products that revolutionize the industry. It is an opportunity to work with state of the art technologies and start-ups combined with the business knowledge that comes from established leaders in the insurance industry. Specifically The Lab is looking to incorporate emerging Big Data and Analytics technologies to revolutionize how the insurance industry works. This can be everything from drone and satellite imagery to aid post catastrophe to social media analytics to better understand our customers needs to the Internet of Things and connect home and car technologies.
Linguamatics
Linguamatics transforms unstructured big data into impactful insights to advance human health and wellbeing. A world leader in deploying innovative natural language processing (NLP)-based text mining for high-value knowledge discovery and decision support, Linguamatics’ solutions are used by top commercial, academic and government organizations, including 18 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and US National Cancer Institute, Cancer Research UK, and leading US healthcare organizations.
Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We give everyone – from emerging artists to global brands – everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. Adobe Document Cloud is revolutionizing the way the world works with documents. It”s the newest cloud offering at Adobe, and a very exciting place to be. The Document Cloud combines a collection of online services integrated with Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. Our subscription base is growing rapidly and we are continually rolling out new features and services. We work in small, agile teams with considerable autonomy and we value engineers with technical competence, creativity, flexibility, strong customer focus and an eagerness for learning and collaboration.
CL Seminar Series March 3: Dr. Sravana Reddy
Obfuscating Gender in Social Media Writing
Sravana Reddy
Researcher, Wellesley College
Friday March 3, 3:15 in Volen 101
The vast availability of textual data on social media has led to an interest in algorithms to automatically predict demographic attributes based on the user’s writing. These methods are valuable for social science research as well as targeted advertising and profiling, but also compromise the privacy of users who may not realize that their personal idiolects can give away their identities. Can we automatically modify a text so that the author is classified as a certain target gender, under limited knowledge of the classifier, while preserving the text’s fluency and meaning? In this talk, I present a model to modify a text, show empirical results with Twitter and Yelp data, and outline future directions.
Bio:
Sravana Reddy is a researcher at Wellesley College working on natural language processing and its intersections with privacy, the digital humanities, and sociolinguistics. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Chicago, and a bachelors’ from Brandeis University.
Brandeis CL spring “Meet’n’Greet” Industry Reception
The Brandeis Computational Linguistics program held its spring Industry Reception networking event. Technical representatives from twelve companies attended and spent two hours talking with students about what they do in their companies and collected resumes from students looking for internships and jobs. Alumni were among the representatives from Amazon, BBN, Basis, Burning Glass, and Callminer. Other companies attending included Fidelity, Cobalt, ISI, SAP, Optum, SIFT, and Spotify. Many of those companies also have interns or alumni from the program.
Check out descriptions of these and other companies that have attended our receptions in the past in the Industry Catalog. The reception is held every semester, with generally 12-15 companies attending each time.
Information Sciences Institute
The Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a world leader in research and development of advanced information processing, computer and communications technologies. A unit of
the University of Southern California’s highly ranked Viterbi School of Engineering, ISI is one of the nation’s largest, most successful university- affiliated computer research institutes. Our work ranges from theoretical basic research, such as core engineering and computer science discovery, to applied research and development, such as design and modeling of innovative prototypes and devices. ISI’s focus areas include natural language, machine translation and information integration. ISI is based in Marina del Rey, California, and maintains offices in Arlington, Virginia and Waltham, Massachusetts.
Spotify
Spotify is changing the way the world listens to music. In Boston (Davis Square) we do this by making Spotify more relevant, personal, and natural through applying machine learning, natural language processing, conversational systems, and much more to the world’s largest and richest collection of music-related data. This good work is nurtured in an amazing culture based on what we value most: passion, innovation, sincerity, collaboration and playfulness.
Conversational Interactions conference
I attended the Conversational Interaction conference this week in San Jose, which featured a wide range of speakers, many of whom were talking about how we move from transactional to conversational interactions with our favorite devices.
Here are a couple great reviews from Wolf Paulus and Nancy Jamison.
Welcome
The industry catalog is a resource for our students to know what companies do work related to computational linguistics. “Brandeis connections” lists students who work or have worked as interns or employees at the company. If you’d like to add your company, send a short description to mmeteer at brandeis dot com along with the categories you’d like to be listed under.
SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP helps companies of all sizes and industries innovate through simplification. From the back office to the boardroom, warehouse to storefront, on premise to cloud, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably.
The SAP HANA text analysis team – located in Boston, MA – combines the talents of computational linguists and skilled software engineers to deliver best-of-breed text analysis capabilities in all major languages. The team’s strategic focus is the development of natural-language processing functionality for the SAP Foundation for Health, the HANA–based central component of our newly formed product unit for healthcare. By combining structured and unstructured data for comprehensive analytical processes, the platform functions as an integration point for many diverse health–related applications and forms the foundation of SAP’s solutions for personalized medicine.
Brandeis connections: Russel Entrikin, Annie Thorburn
MITRE
The MITRE Corporation is a not-for-profit organization that operates research and development centers sponsored by the federal government. Our centers support our sponsors with scientific research and analysis, development and acquisition, and systems engineering and integration. We also have an independent research program that explores new and expanded uses of technologies to meet our sponsors’ needs. Our principal locations are in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va.
Brandeis Connections: David Tresner-Kirsch
Philips Research North America
At Philips, we are driven by our mission to improve the lives of 3 billion people per year by 2025, and every day we move closer to achieving our goal by creating cutting-edge solutions that lead to confident diagnosis, improved care, and increased quality of life for patients. Named one of the Top 50 Happiest Companies in America in 2013 and a 2014 Top Place to Work by the Boston Globe, we enable our employees to create a legacy in life through their work and support their development through people-centric learning, total rewards and personalized development planning programs.
Our research and business provides unique opportunities to develop cutting edge clinical solutions and deliver meaningful solutions in the healthcare space. Specifically, our ongoing efforts in healthcare research for real time diagnostic and therapeutic decision support applications leverage expertise in automated question answering, semantic reasoning, social media data analysis, predictive modeling and knowledge discovery driven by the state-of-the-art methodologies in computational linguistics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning with deep architecture. We maintain collaborative relationships with various universities, scientific institutions, academic organizations and governmental resources.
Genesys
Genesys is the market leader in omnichannel customer experience (Voice, IVR, Web, Chat, E-Mail) and in contact center solutions, both in our Cloud offering and on Customer premises. We help brands of all sizes, from Microsoft, Nike, and Fidelity to Fred’s Pizza Shop, make great Customer Experience great business.
The Genesys Customer Experience platform powers optimal end-customer journeys across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates.
Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 Customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day.
Brandeis Seminar Series
The Brandeis CL Seminar series brings speakers from research and industry related to computational linguistics and is open to all. If you’d like to be a speaker or suggest a speaker contact Marie Meteer, mmeteer at brandeis dot com.
CL Seminar on the LAPPS Natural Language Grid, Feb 1
The Language Application Grid as a Platform for NLP Research
Keith Suderman
Vassar College
Wednesday, February 1 at 3pm
Volen 101
Brandeis University
The LAPPS Grid project (Vassar, Brandeis, CMU, LDC), which has developed a platform providing access to a vast array of language processing tools and resources for the purposes of research and development in natural language processing (NLP), has recently expanded to enhance its usability by non-technical users such as those in the Digital Humanities community. We provide a live demonstration of LAPPS Grid use, ranging from “from scratch” construction of a workflow using atomic tools to a pre-configured docker image that can be run off-the-shelf on a laptop or in the cloud, for several tasks of relevance to the NLP and DH communities.
Keith Suderman is a Research Assistant with the Department of Computer Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Keith works full time on the development of the LAPPS Grid API, architecture, and tool integrations.
Basis Technology
For over 20 years, Basis Technology has been a pioneer in machine learning, revealing meaningful information and intelligence out of raw, unstructured text. The Rosette platform, accessible on premise or SaaS, gives businesses and government agencies around the world the necessary interoperable linguistic tools for deep knowledge decision making. We work with companies large and small who build applications spanning social media monitoring, risk and compliance, identity management and security scanning. The Rosette® platform adds a wealth of powerful functionality, from pure linguistics to entity, name and relationship centric analysis in Asian, European and Middle Eastern languages, to any underlying search or database infrastructure.
Brandeis connections: Zachary Yocum, Justin Su, Anna Astori
Cobalt Speech & Language
Cobalt is a speech & language solutions outsourcing and consulting firm. Many software companies set out to build some new project, incorporating some component of speech or language technology, only to realize that speech & language technology is wicked hard, and not like other technology. Human language is the most sophisticated trait of the most sophisticated creature on the planet, and it’s not surprising that it’s hard to do. Cobalt is the speech & language lab for all of those companies that don’t have the ability to establish their own dedicated lab — the lab for the rest of the world. We employ smart & experienced scientists around the world in a virtual company (meaning we work from home) on a variety of interesting projects. In general, our customers are looking for technology that is within reach, but not offered by simple APIs from other speech providers.
Brandeis connections: Jake Freyer
UFA
UFA is a leading, privately-held software engineering firm specializing in Air Traffic Control simulation technologies. UFA, Inc provide simulation products to civil aviation, military, and university customers worldwide. A key element of the product is speech recognition modeling Air Traffic Control commands.
Brandeis connections: Cynthia Goodman, Travis Hasley
Partners Healthcare
Partners HealthCare is a not-for-profit health care system that is committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community locally and globally. Collaboration among our institutions and health care professionals is central to our efforts to advance our mission. Founded in 1994 by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, Partners HealthCare includes community and specialty hospitals, a managed care organization, a physician network, community health centers, home care and other health-related entities. Several of our hospitals are teaching affiliates of Harvard Medical School, and Partners is a national leader in biomedical research.
Brandeis connections: Ken Lai, Suzanne Blakeley, Jessica Huynh, Clay Riley
Nuance
Nuance Communications is reinventing the relationship between people and technology. We believe in the power of intelligent systems, and quite specifically what the power can do for you. Our innovations in voice, natural language understanding, reasoning and systems integration come together to create more human technology.
We are pioneers in making technology fluent in all things human: from understanding spoken words and extracting their meaning to adaptively and seamlessly interpreting the swipe of a fingertip. Every interaction can finally be understood to deliver exactly what a person needs. And we continuously evolve the ability to perceive the nuance of words, actions and meaning — to fit seamlessly into your life, your business and your world.
Nuance is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, with more than 35 offices around the world, and approximately 14,000 employees worldwide. We have a significant portfolio of intellectual property, with more than 4,500 global issued and pending patents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience our proven applications, including more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100 use our solutions.
IBM WATSON
IBM Watson Group is a leading-edge start-up business within IBM, charged with ushering in the new era of cognitive computing. Watson mirrors the same cognitive processes as humans with the ability to ingest massive amounts of unstructured data. At IBM Watson Group, we’re transforming a range of industries and professions from medical research and diagnosis to investment guidance and customer service. You can see some of the impact that IBM Watson is making at https://ibm.biz/watsondiscoveryadvisor or you can start building apps yourself with the Watson Developer Cloud at http://ibmwatson.com/developercloud
We have opportunities across the business, whether it’s developing code, conducting research in the cognitive space or implementing solutions for clients
HUMEDICA
Humedica is a clinical intelligence company that powers health care, life sciences, and research organizations to make better-informed, more effective decisions. Our cloud-based analytics solutions create a longitudinal view of both individual patients and patient populations. We gather, normalize, and analyze data from disparate sources that, uniquely, span the continuum of care–including EHRs, Practice Management Systems and claims. By the end of 2015, our data will account for 65M patient lives in the U.S.
Humedica NLP is at the heart of the process, extracting structure from billions of free-form physician notes. NLP data is combined with our other data assets to form one of the largest actionable pools of healthcare information in the world.
Big Data is ushering in a revolution in health care. We are looking for scientists and engineers who are excited by the idea of using their skills to make a difference in this field. We have the infrastructure and the data to enable that revolution–we are looking for people who want to be part of it.
SIFT
Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT) is a small Artificial Intelligence R&D company headquartered in Minneapolis with an office in Lexington Center. We do basic and applied contract research for government agencies, principally DARPA, and publish our results at academic conferences. Everyone codes. Everyone contributes to proposals and collaborates on papers. Interns have mentors to introduce them to their projects and the SIFT culture so they can immediately contribute. We have active projects in all areas of natural language, from the simplest bag of words to the deepest semantic and pragmatic analysis. At our Boston office we are in the middle of a multi-site research effort in collaborative dialog for DARPA. SIFT as a whole also works on problems in cyber-security, planning and plan recognition, games with a purpose, supervisory control, and human factors.
Brandeis connections: Current: Alex Plotnick, Past: Amandalynne Paullada, Chris Ward
Rakuten
Rakuten, Inc. is the largest ecommerce company in Japan, and third largest ecommerce marketplace company worldwide. Rakuten provides a variety of consumer and business-focused services including e-commerce, e-reading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. The company is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Western Europe, and the Americas. Founded in 1997, Rakuten is headquartered in Tokyo, with over 10,000 employees and partner staff worldwide. Rakuten’s 2013 revenues were 518.6 billion yen.
Rakuten Ichiba, our Japanese ecommerce site, is named after Rakuichi-Rakuza, the first free and open marketplace in Japan. When used as a verb, raku is written with a Chinese character meaning to enjoy oneself. The same character is used in Rakuten’s name, which means “positive spirit,” because we believe that shopping should always be entertaining. These words symbolize the forward looking nature of our business, hence the name, Rakuten, Inc.
Brandeis connections: Aaron Levine
QPID Health
QPID Health streamlines mandated quality reporting for hospitals and medical groups. Providers cut data abstraction costs and get the credit they deserve for the care they deliver. Our applications leverage our powerful clinical reasoning software, which combines natural language processing (NLP) and clinical logic. The software locates & synthesizes patient facts by analyzing both structured data fields and free form text in electronic health records.
Boston Connections: Michael Shafir, Mike Cravaro, Nick Botcham, Justin Su, Yuanyuan Ma
Optum Analytics
Optum Analytics is a clinical intelligence company that powers health care, life sciences, and research organizations to make better-informed, more effective decisions. Our cloud-based analytics solutions create a longitudinal view of both individual patients and patient populations. We gather, normalize, and analyze data from disparate sources that, uniquely, span the continuum of care–including EHRs, Practice Management Systems and claims.
Optum NLP is at the heart of the process, extracting structure from billions of free-form physician notes. NLP data is combined with our other data assets to form one of the largest actionable pools of healthcare information in the world.
Big Data is ushering in a revolution in health care. We are looking for scientists and engineers who are excited by the idea of using their skills to make a difference in this field. We have the infrastructure and the data to enable that revolution–we are looking for people who want to be part of it.
Interactions
Interactions: For your customers, checking an order or fixing a problem can sometimes be complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. Interactions virtual assistant solutions turn frustrating experiences into productive conversations. Unlike other automated applications, Interactions solutions are built with our patented Adaptive-UnderstandingTM technology that delivers unprecedented comprehension. So your customers can speak in their own words – and accomplish more in less time. Each month, Interactions helps millions of our clients’ customers get things done. Why make things complicated when the right choice is simple?
Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software.[6] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results. Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine (Google Search). It offers services designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Sheets and Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant messaging and video chat (Google Allo/Duo/Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and turn-by-turn navigation (Google Maps), video-sharing (YouTube), taking notes (Google Keep), organizing and editing photos (Google Photos), and a web browser (Google Chrome)
Location: Mountain View CA
Brandeis students and alumni: Cory Massaro
Crimson Hexagon
Crimson Hexagon is SAAS company working to surface consumer insights to enterprise companies with a strong focus on social media listening and analytics. We empower our clients search through nearly 1 Trillion social media posts for content related to their brand, target audience, or any topic of interest and understand both the conversation and the communities of people participating in it.
As a research scientist, I work to help improve our search and text analytics capabilities across. In the past, as part of my work I have had the opportunity to train completely new models for text classification, created new visualizations to reveal interesting patterns, and expanded existing capabilities to new languages.
Boston MA
Brandeis students and alumni: Colin Sullivan
Cognii
Cognii is a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence based educational technologies. Cognii’s award winning Virtual Learning Assistant uses Natural Language Processing to automatically grade students’ open-response answers and provide personalized tutoring. Cognii helps students learn better, improves teachers’ productivity and helps Schools reduce the cost of delivering high quality education at a large scale.
Location: Boston MA
Brandeis students and alumni: Ryan Nicole
CallMiner
CallMiner helps businesses and organizations improve contact center performance and gather key business intelligence by automating their ability to listen to every customer interaction. CallMiner’s market leading cloud-based voice of the customer analytics solution automatically analyzes contacts across all communication channels: calls, chat, email, and social. CallMiner offers both real-time monitoring and post-call analytics, delivering actionable insights to contact center staff, business analysts, and executives. The results include improved agent performance, sales, operational efficiency, customer experience, and regulatory compliance. With over 10 years of industry leadership and over 2 billion hours of conversations analyzed, CallMiner serves some of the world’s largest call centers, delivering highly effective, usable, and scalable speech analytics solutions. Locations: Waltham MA, Ft. Myers FL
Burning Glass
Burning Glass Technologies delivers job market analytics that empower employers, workers, and educators to make data-driven decisions. Burning Glass is reshaping how the job market works, with data that identify the skill gaps that keep job seekers and employers apart and tools that enable both sides to bridge that gap and connect more easily. The company’s artificial intelligence technology analyzes hundreds of millions of job postings and real-life career transitions to provide insight into labor market patterns. This real-time strategic intelligence offers crucial insights, such as which jobs are most in demand, the specific skills employers need, and the career directions that offer the highest potential for workers.
Burning Glass’ applications drive practical solutions and are used across the job market: by educators in aligning programs with the market, by employers and recruiters in filling positions more effectively, and by policy makers in shaping strategic workforce decisions. At the same time, Burning Glass’ data-driven applications for workers and students help them choose career goals and build the skills they need to get ahead. Based in Boston, Burning Glass is playing a growing role in informing the global conversation on education and the workforce, and in creating a job market that works for everyone.
Brandeis Connections: Adam Berger, Alex Nunes, Noa Naaman, Xinhao Wang
BBN
BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that creates technology and leverages the resulting intellectual property to produce advanced, repeatable solutions. such as the Boomerang shooter detection system. Speech and Language is one of the largest research groups in the country and advances the state-of-the-art in speech and natural language processing through the development of novel algorithms and techniques and creates custom solutions in translation, language understanding, and document/image analysis. Current projects include: TransTalk, BBN Broadcast Monitoring System, Machine Reading, and video analysis.
AVOKE Caller Experience Analytics leverages 30 years of BBN research in speech recognition, language processing and call center optimization to provide an innovative new analytics solution. Our mission is to make call centers satisfying for callers and efficient for the companies that operate them.
Brandeis Connections: Michael Shafir, Mike Crivaro, Nick Botcham, Aaron Levine, Alex Nunes, Anya Korneyeva, Cory Massaro, Adam Berger, Heather Lourie, Hannah Provenza, Jose Molina
Basis Technology
For over 20 years, Basis Technology has been a pioneer in machine learning, revealing meaningful information and intelligence from raw, unstructured text. The Rosette® text analytics platform, accessible on premise or as a web API, gives businesses and government agencies around the world the necessary interoperable linguistic tools for deep knowledge decision-making. We work with companies, large and small, building enterprise search solutions spanning social media monitoring, risk and compliance, identity management, and security scanning. Rosette adds a wealth of powerful functionality—from pure linguistics to analyses centered around entities, names and relationships in Asian, European, and Middle Eastern languages—to any underlying search or database infrastructure. For more information, email info@basistech.com or visit www.basistech.com.
Brandeis students and alumni: Zachary Yocum, Anna Astori, Justin Su
Apple Speech
Play a part in the next revolution in human-computer interaction. Contribute to a product that is redefining mobile computing. Create groundbreaking technology for large scale systems, spoken language, big data, and artificial intelligence. And work with the people who created the intelligent assistant that helps millions of people get things done — just by asking. Join the Siri Speech team at Apple.
The Siri team is looking for exceptionally skilled and creative Engineers eager to get involved in hands-on work improving the Siri experience.
Amazon
Who We Are: We are a team of scientists and developers working on audio, speech and natural language solutions that will revolutionize how customers interact with Amazon’s products and services.
What We Do: Our mission is to push the envelope in automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), and audio signal processing in order to provide the best possible experience for our customers.
What We’re Looking For: We are a rapidly growing team and are looking for passionate, entrepreneurial research scientists and engineers who have deep expertise in speech recognition, language understanding and audio processing. We also have openings for research managers who have a proven track record of managing and mentoring research scientists.
Brandeis Connections: Andy Rosenbaum, Ricki Brutti, Elizabeth Baran