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In an effort to help solve one of the grand challenges of artificial intelligence, the University of Michigan and IBM have launched a $4.5 million collaboration to develop a new class of conversational technologies that will enable people to interact more naturally and effectively with computers.
In Project Sapphire, IBM and the U-M Artificial Intelligence Lab will develop a cognitive system that functions as an academic adviser for undergraduate computer science and engineering majors at the university. The system will allow researchers to explore how smart machines interact with people in goal-driven dialogues.
To do this, the team will capture and annotate large volumes of approved recorded human-to-human conversations between undergraduates and their advisers on topics such as course selection, career advice, extracurricular recommendations and homework resources. The team will use these conversations to train the system on how to respond to interactions with students, and ultimately learn how to automatically navigate and successfully reply in conversations with those using the system.
"Human-to-machine interactions, similar to human-to-human conversations, are rarely confined to one question and one answer," said David Nahamoo, IBM fellow and chief technologist for conversational systems, IBM Watson. "They involve multiple turns of a conversation with responses that can be imprecise and unclear, making it difficult to simulate the human experience.
"By partnering with the University of Michigan, we have an enormous opportunity to apply AI technologies in new ways and transform human-machine communication. This collaboration marks the next chapter in a longstanding relationship between the university and IBM to place the power of cognitive technologies into the hands of the next generation of thinkers."
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