Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Prof Harry Shum describes the Bing Dialog Model and demonstrates some of its innovative features which allow Bing to engage with users to clarify intent and facilitate task completion.
Institute for Advanced Study Enquiries ias@ust.hk / 2358 5912 http://ias.ust.hk
Abstract
The decade-old Internet search outcomes, manifested in the form of "ten blue links," are no longer sufficient for Internet users. Many studies have shown that when users are ushered off the conventional search result pages through blue links, their needs are often partially met at best in a "hit-or-miss" fashion. To tackle this challenge, the speaker and his team have designed Bing, Microsoft's decision engine, to not just navigate users to a landing page through a blue link but to continue engaging with users to clarify intent and facilitate task completion. Underlying this new paradigm is the Bing Dialog Model that consists of three building blocks: an indexing system that comprehensively collects information from the web and systematically harvests knowledge, an intent model that statistically infers user intent and predicts next action, and an interaction model that elicits user intent through mathematically optimized presentations of web information and domain knowledge that matches user needs. In this talk, the speaker will describe Bing Dialog Model in details and demonstrate it in action through some innovative features since the launch of www.Bing.com.
About the Speaker
Harry Shum is currently Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. He joined Microsoft Research in 1996 where he worked as a researcher on computer vision and computer graphics. In 1999, he moved to Beijing to help start Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). His tenure there began as a research manager and subsequently moved up to Assistant Managing Director, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, and Distinguished Engineer. In 2007, Prof Shum became Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, and was lauded for his leadership in technology and management. He has taken the new role of leading the Core Search Development.
Prof Shum received his PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. A Fellow of IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Prof Shum has published more than 100 papers in computer vision, computer graphics, pattern recognition, statistical learning, and robotics, and holds more than 50 US patents. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST.
Institute for Advanced Study Enquiries ias@ust.hk / 2358 5912 http://ias.ust.hk
