Yahoo launches Effort to search for 10 million $ to invent a smarter Siri

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Saturday, February 22, 2014

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Academics at CMU will try to extend the services of Yahoo with mobile applications that act as personal assistants.

Future mobile applications from Yahoo might come with a hint of intelligence that enables them to act as personal assistants. The company has made a $ 10 million $ to grant to the University of Carnegie Mellon for a project called InMind, which aims to create and test the services of style assistant for mobile devices.

According to the five-year project, announced last week, researchers at the Department of automatic learning of the University will have access to the technology that runs existing services such as mail, Yahoo and news and will be able to develop new applications to extend. These experimental applications and services will be tested by Carnegie students and staff who give them access to their accounts Yahoo, a group numbering potentially thousands of people.

"InMind will be the next generation of personal agent who will guide us in our personal lives, on our personal devices," said Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon, during a protest on the campus Wednesday last to announce the partnership.

With this project, Yahoo asked a result more defined that is typical for Internet companies, academic research funding. The results will be similar to the type of beta product generally established within a company. This reflects the beliefs of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, which said that using data to better serve the billion people who use the company's products each month is crucial for the reconstruction of his company and his reputation (see "From Yahoo Expanded Labs").

Ron Brachman, head of the laboratories of Yahoo, said he expects the project InMind to experiment with applications that are capable of rudimentary conversation - for example, ask a person to follow-up questions and to make suggestions based on new information. "It is absent from Siri," he said, adding that although the personal assistant of Apple is impressive, it does not attempt to understand the context in which it is in a question: it does not understand that the user is or may be required at this time.

Designed jointly Brachman development project InMind with Tom Mitchell, head of the Department of automatic learning of Carnegie. The two men participated in a project funded by the Pentagon called CALO, who created the technology behind the developed startup Siri, which was later purchased by Apple (see "Intelligent software Assistant").

Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who direct jointly the project InMind with Mitchell, said, at the launch, that data Yahoo has its users, the content of their e-mails to accounts of their clicks on press articles, could inform the new applications with a better understanding of their users and the world they live in. "in order to really customize way interessantevous must infer psychological States and beliefs"she says.

Cassell said the existing Carnegie Mellon projects which could be used to build such applications. A system called NELL, for example, spent the past four years, trawling online text to put into place a capital of knowledge that could be used to identify the interests of the person. Cassell, said that the effort could also draw on CHORUS, an artificial wizard capable of conversation. Developed in part by a researcher now at Carnegie Mellon, it is based on the crowdsourcing (see «Artificial Intelligence powered by many men»).

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