Humans are unique in their ability to learn from, understand the world through and communicate with language… Or are they? Perhaps not for long, if Dr. Layla El Asri, a Research Manager at Microsoft Research Montreal, has a say in it. She wants you to be able to talk to your machine just like you'd talk to another person. The hard part is getting your machine to understand and talk back to you like it's that other person. Today, Dr. El Asri talks about the particular challenges she and other scientists face in building sophisticated dialogue systems that lay the foundation for talking machines. She also explains how reinforcement learning, in the form of a text game generator called TextWorld, is helping us get there, and relates a fascinating story from more than fifty years ago that reveals some of the safeguards necessary to ensure that when we design machines specifically to pass the Turing test, we design them in an ethical and responsible way. Layla El Asri: In a video game, most of the time you only have a few actions that you can take. You just need to learn when you should go right, when you should go left, when you should go up, when you should go down. But when it comes to dialogue, you need to learn how to make a sentence that is grammatically correct, and then you need to learn how to make a sentence that makes sense in the global context of the dialogue, or a sentence that brings new information in the dialogue that is going to make the person you are talking to satisfied with the sentence. Your action space is just huge because it's not just up/down, right/left, it's all the sentences you could imagine! Host: You're listening to the Microsoft Research Podcast, a show that brings you closer to the cutting-edge of technology research and the scientists behind it. Host: Humans are unique in their ability to learn from, understand the world through and communicate with language… Or are they? Perhaps not for long, if Dr. Layla El Asri, a Research Manager at Microsoft Research Montreal, has a say in it. She wants you to be able to talk to your machine just like you'd talk to another person.

Artificial intelligence algorithms, services and products are a reflection of their human designers. Accordingly, it's important that these teams are comprised of diverse individuals, each bringing unique perspectives and experiences to the table. Following our recent support of McGill's AI Lab for Social Good, we are proud to be a sponsor of the Women in Deep Learning event at the Université de Montréal. Taking place alongside the Deep Learning Summer School, this full day program seeks to create a discussion about creating work environments that meet the needs of women in research and science. "A diverse working environment is the most creative and productive one for longer terms. AI is shaping our future, and AI/STEM is still struggling to achieve even 25% of women in its global workforce. Creating awareness about increasing diversity including breaking the gender stereotypes is the need of the hour," said Subarna Tripathi, PhD candidate, University of California San Diego.