Conversational Interfaces for Health, Search and Crowd Computing

Abstract: Conversational interfaces have been argued to have advantages over traditional GUIs due to having a more human-like interaction. The rise in popularity of conversational agents has enabled humans to interact with machines more naturally. There is a growing familiarity among people with conversational interactions mediated by technology due to the widespread use of mobile devices and messaging services. Today, over half the population on our planet has access to the Internet with ever-lowering barriers of accessibility. This talk will explore our recent work, showcasing the benefits of employing novel conversational interfaces in the domains of Health and Well-being, Web Search and Crowd Computing.

Bio: Ujwal Gadiraju is an Assistant Professor at the Web Information Systems group of the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS/EWI), Delft University of Technology. Ujwal is a Director of the Delft Design@Scale AI Lab and co-leads the research line on Crowd Computing and Human-Centered AI at the WIS group. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Prior to joining the WIS group, Ujwal worked at the L3S Research Center as a Postdoctoral researcher between 2017-2020. Ujwal received a PhD degree (Dr. rer. nat.) in Computer Science from the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany in 2017, and an MSc. Computer Science degree from TU Delft, the Netherlands in 2012. His research interests lie at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Retrieval (IR), with a special focus on Crowd Computing and Human-AI interaction. Ujwal’s prior work in Crowd Computing has explored methods to improve the effectiveness of the crowdsourcing paradigm, running large-scale human-centered experiments to understand the interaction between humans and machines, and understanding the societal impact of algorithmic decision-making. For more information see –https://www.ujwalgadiraju.com.