Joining Siri at Apple

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1. Abstract

   We focus on improving the effectiveness of a Virtual Assistant (VA) in recognizing emerging entities in spoken queries. We introduce a method that uses historical user interactions to forecast which entities will gain in popularity and become trending, and it subse- quently integrates the predictions within the Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) component of the VA. Experiments show that our proposed approach results in a 20% relative reduction in errors on emerging entity name utterances without degrading the overall recognition quality of the system.

   Happy to share the news about my first joint pubication with the Siri Speech team at Apple. Our short paper Predicting Entity Popularity to Improve Spoken Entity Recognition by Virtual Assistants with Christophe van Gysel, myself, Ernie Pusateri, and Ilya Oparin, is accepted at SIGIR 2020.

   23.60% similar — Paper at SIGIR 2020 — Predicting Entity Popularity to Improve Spoken Entity Recognition by Virtual Assistants

2. 

   I was happy to be invited at Frankfurt Data Science meetup to talk about data science, meetups, and how to build a data science-oriented startup. The event was held at Frankfurt School on March 1^st, 2018. In my talk I gave an overview of the meetup scene in Amsterdam, briefly presented Amsterdam Data Science and its activites, and then I shared my experiences on founding and developing 904Labs, before I delved into one of my favorite topics: machine learning and search.

   19.45% similar — Talk at Frankfurt Data Science meetup

3. On 31 May, I was invited to give a talk at TECH Talks in Amsterdam. TECH Talks is a new meetup organized by Techloop.io, a new way for matching jobs and talent in IT. My talk revolved on how we built an e-commerce focused search engine using machine learning (or as most people know it, A.I.). The meetup had a great start with more than 200 registered people and more than 100 people showed up; the room at TQ was at its maximum capacity! The audience was diverse with a nice mix of frontend, backend , senior and junior engineers, and also people from other disciplines who are interested in keeping up with latest developments in IT and e-commerce. Techloop and TQ were great organizers providing a great atmosphere (pizza and beer, included) facilitating great chats and networks afterwards.

   You can see the video of the talks here (mine is the first after the introduction by Techloop):

   19.02% similar — Talk at TECH Talks Amsterdam

4. Happy to share yet another publication with the Siri Speech team at Apple, this time led by Sashank Gondala, who interned with us last year. Our full paperError-driven Pruning of Language Models for Virtual Assistants is accepted at ICASSP 2021.

   18.27% similar — Paper at ICASSP 2021 — Error-driven Pruning of Language Models for Virtual Assistants

5. 

   17.41% similar — Keynote speech at AI2Future

6. I was happy to be invited at the Amsterdam City A.I. Event on December 11, 2017. My talk revolved around our experiences at 904Labs in building an A.I. focused company. It was fun to be among A.I. enthusiasts and to see that people identified with our experiences–which means that we are on good track!

   The talk is online on YouTube (clicking the link will start playing the video at the start of my talk):

   

   Below are some tweets from the event:

   15.35% similar — Talk at Amsterdam City A.I. Event

7. I took part in SIREN 2008, a research event in the Netherlands, presenting our work with Martha Larson and Maarten de Rijke, on Term Clouds as Surrogates for User Generated Speech [1]; see post

   References

   [1] Manos Tsagkias, Martha Larson, and Maarten de Rijke. 2008. Term clouds as surrogates for user generated speech. In Proceedings of the 31^st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR ‘08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 773–774. ACM Link PDF

   14.69% similar — Talk at SIREN 2008 on Speech Term Clouds