*UPDATE 3/19/17: PRE-SALE TICKETS SOLD OUT! LIMITED DOOR TICKETS AVAILABLE ON FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE BASIS ($15 - CASH ONLY).* 

AGENDA:

[6:30 - 7:00 PM] Networking (Wine & Beer)

[7:00 PM] Welcome Introduction

  Maryam Farooq (Organizer, NYAI) 

[7:10 PM] Keynote Presentation: "Key Learnings of Building an AI Autonomous Agent Using Supervised Learning"

Dennis Mortensen (Founder/CEO, x.ai)

[8:00 PM] Rapid Q&A 

[8:15 PM] Closing Remarks

[8:20 - 9:00 PM] Continued Networking

DESCRIPTION:
Join us for what's sure to be an awesome night in AI! We're excited to be hosting Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of x.ai, who will be talking about "Key Learnings of Building an AI Autonomous Agent Using Supervised Learning". 

Wine + Beer + AI + Networking = The Best Tuesday ever!

 ABSTRACT: 

In this talk, x.ai CEO and Founder Dennis Mortensen will discuss some of the important factors and decisions that need to be made in building an AI autonomous agent. As x.ai developed its AI assistants—Amy & Andrew—who take over meeting scheduling entirely, they encountered quite a few unexpected challenges.

This talk will cover the key questions and challenges to consider if you’re involved in designing artificially intelligent agents, based on those faced by x.ai in building their AI assistants:

-Building an intelligent agent requires that you fully understand the domain in which your agent operates and define that domain, and the human foibles within it, exhaustively. Once you define the universe in which your agent exists, you have to go about figuring out what data you need to collect and annotate.

-When designing an agent that exists only over dialogue, you have to decide whether or not to humanize your agent; there is no in-between. Companies like Amazon (Alexa), Apple (Siri), and x.ai (Amy and Andrew) have chosen to do this, whereas Google (Google Assistant) has not. If and when you do decide to humanize your agent, you really have to try to make that work, by naming your agent, having them show empathy, and developing a personality (via text or voice) that is believably human.

-Due to the “invisible” nature of most AI products, a lot rests on the question of designing interactions. There’s a big upfront investment and effort into getting those right. Despite the lack of visual interface, we believe it’s worth over-investing in the write or NLG (natural language generation) dimension. This tends to be counterintuitive since much of the discussion to date around AI has been focused on the “read” or NLU (natural language understanding) dimension of agents.

ANNOUCEMENTS:

1) Samsung NEXT will be hosting an ARTIK Workshop event on Thurs, 3/30

2) Introducing Paper Space - check out this cool company!

3) The Future Labs AI Summit is on Weds, 4/5 with a stacked speaker list (Yann LeCun, Gary Marcus, & more!). Register here!

4) Amper Music is hiring for the role of Data Scientist, Full Stack Developer, and Software Composition Team Member!