Research in human-machine dialogue (aka ConvAI) has been driven by the quest for open-domain, knowledgeable and multimodal agents. In contrast, the complex problem of designing , training and evaluating a conversational system and its components is currently reduced to a) prompting LLMs, b) coarse evaluation of machine responses and c) poor management of the affective signals. In this talk, we will review the current state-of-the-art in human-machine dialogue research and its limitations. We will present the most challenging frontiers of conversational AI when the objective is to create personal conversational systems that benefit individuals. In this context we will report experiments and RCT trials of so-called personal healthcare agents supporting individuals and healthcare professionals.

At the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab (University of Trento, Italy) we are looking for highly motivated and talented graduate students to join our research team and work on Conversational Artificial Intelligence.

Conversational Artificial Intelligence includes the following research areas:

- Natural Language Processing
- Conversational Modeling and Systems
- Machine Learning
- Affective Computing

Longitudinal Dialogues (LD) are the most challenging type of conversation for human-machine dialogue systems. LDs include the recollections of events, personal thoughts, and emotions specific to each individual in a sparse sequence of dialogue sessions. Dialogue systems designed for LDs should uniquely interact with the users over multiple sessions and long periods of time (e.g. weeks), and engage them in personal dialogues to elaborate on their feelings, thoughts, and real-life events.
In this talk, the speaker presents the process of designing and training dialogue models for LDs, starting from the acquisition of a multi-session dialogue corpus in the mental health domain, models for user profiling, and personalization, to fine-tuning SOTA Pre-trained #Language Models and the evaluation of the models using human judges.

The Laboratory for Augmented Health Environments will develop data, AI and robotics-driven prototypes and train future surgeons and healthcare professionals. A collaboration of the University of Trento with the School of Medicine and the Regional Healthcare Services

Ore 17:00 - 19.00 | lunedì 13 novembre 2023
Introduce e modera:
Paola Iamiceli, Università di Trento
Ne discutono:
Marco Zenati, Harvard Medical School e UniTrento;
Cesare Hassan, Hunimed; Marco Francone, Hunimed;
Carlo C. Quattrocchi, UniTrento e APSS; Lorenzo Luciani, APSS;
Andrea Passerini, UniTrento; Giuseppe Riccardi, UniTrento;
Eleonora Marchesini, FBK; Roberto Carbone, FBK;
Marta Fasan, UniTrento