U-M, IBM Partner on Advanced Conversational Computing System

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"Natural conversations bring in so many different aspects of human intelligence—knowledge, context, goals and emotion, for instance. In many ways, to build a versatile conversational system is a grand challenge for artificial intelligence," said Satinder Singh Baveja, professor of computer science and engineering and director of U-M's AI Lab. "We look forward to taking it on with this partnership."

Through the partnership, eight computer science and engineering faculty members, along with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, will work with IBM scientists. Within the next couple years, they expect their system to be up and running.

The digital adviser isn't meant to replace human professionals who guide students along the academic and emotional journey that is college. Once it's developed, students can choose to talk to it for simple or routine questions, or to complement a meeting with a person.

Students might tell the system their preferences and receive course recommendations that advance them toward their degree. They could define broad career goals and get a good list of electives. They could hear an estimate of how many homework hours their class load might require, or be directed to extracurriculars that might help them land the kind of job they're after.

The system would record the conversations and at any point, it could hand the session over to a human. One of the researchers involved—Emily Mower Provost, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, studies emotional cues. She'll work on enabling Project Sapphire to recognize when students need a real shoulder, even if they're not asking for one.

The automated adviser is one application of what the team envisions to be a platform technology. Project Sapphire's resulting innovations could be embedded into cognitive systems across many industries to improve how they learn and codify human expertise, understand a user's intent and context, and deliver appropriate responses that direct conversations towards a stated goal.

"What we are building has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with our computers and other devices such as our cars and our appliances," Baveja said. "These conversational systems become cognitive advisers that can assist us in a variety of personal, professional and enterprise tasks, such as advising for personal finance, helping employees in scheduling meetings and travel arrangement, and providing technical support to customers of an enterprise."

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