{"id":30349,"date":"2020-12-19T18:31:03","date_gmt":"2020-12-19T23:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/?page_id=30349"},"modified":"2021-06-30T18:04:58","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T22:04:58","slug":"shiv-vitaladevuni-december-2-2016-amazon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/programs\/center-wide-programs-2\/cise-seminars\/2016-2017-cise-sems-lectures-workshops\/shiv-vitaladevuni-december-2-2016-amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"Shiv Vitaladevuni, December 2, 2016, Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, December 2,\u00a02016, 3-4pm<br \/>\n8 St. Mary&#8217;s Street,\u00a0PHO 210<br \/>\nRefreshments at 2:45pm<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/cise\/files\/2016\/11\/vitaladevuni.jpg\" width=\"108\" height=\"144\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-19886 size-full\" alt=\"\" \/>Shiv Vitaladevuni<br \/>\nAmazon<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"p1\"><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><strong>Building Alexa<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Amazon launched Echo, a household conversational device, which allows users to interact via voice with Alexa, including asking questions and issuing commands to play music, control home appliances, etc. A key tenet is to enable hands free, eyes free interaction. Over the last two years, Amazon Echo has gained increasing popularity and expanded capabilities. We will describe some of the speech, language and machine learning research that went into building Alexa and how we are expanding her capabilities.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shiv Vitaladevuni <\/strong>is a Senior Manager in Machine Learning at Amazon Alexa, focusing on R&amp;D for Alexa family of devices such as Echo, Dot, Tap, FireTV, etc. His team develops features for Alexa such as wake word, spoken language understanding for Shopping, and making Alexa more conversational via dialog modeling. Prior to Amazon, Shiv worked on video and text document analysis at Raytheon BBN Tecnologies, and bio-medical image analysis at Howard Hughes Medical Institute<\/p>\n<p>Faculty Host: <strong>Venkatesh Saligrama<br \/>\n<\/strong>Student Host:<strong>\u00a0Andrew Cutler<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, December 2,\u00a02016, 3-4pm 8 St. Mary&#8217;s Street,\u00a0PHO 210 Refreshments at 2:45pm Shiv Vitaladevuni Amazon Building Alexa &nbsp; &nbsp; Amazon launched Echo, a household conversational device, which allows users to interact via voice with Alexa, including asking questions and issuing commands to play music, control home appliances, etc. A key tenet is to enable hands [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15670,"featured_media":0,"parent":32401,"menu_order":18,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30349"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15670"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30350,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30349\/revisions\/30350"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}