Student Name : Giovanni Campagna, Rakesh Ramesh, Silei Xu
Advisor : Monica Lam
Research Areas: Computer Systems

Abstract:
This poster presents the architecture of Almond, an open, crowdsourced, programmable virtual assistant for online services and the Internet of Things (IoT). Almond is the first assistant that lets users specify trigger-action tasks in natural language. Almond addresses four challenges in virtual assistant technology: generality, interoperability, privacy, and usability. For generality, we have created Thingpedia, a crowdsourced public knowledge base of open APIs and their natural language interfaces. Interoperability is provided by ThingTalk, a high-level domain-specific language that connects multiple devices or services via open APIs. For privacy, user credentials and user data are managed by our open-source ThingSystem, which can be run on personal phones or home servers.Finally, for usability, we use machine learning techniques to automatically translate natural language into trigger-action tasks.


The poster will be presented by me, Silei Xu and Rakesh Ramesh. Bio:

Bios:
Giovanni Campagna is a third year graduate student in the Mobile and Social Research Group, and the lead student on the Almond project in general. His interests include programming languages and program synthesis from specifications.

Rakesh Ramesh is a fifth year graduate student in the Mobile and Social Research Group. His interests include natural language processing and deep learning, and he's leading the semantic parser component of Almond.

Silei Xu is a second year graduate student in the Mobile and Social Research Group. His interests include data mining and data analytics. He's leading the data acquisition part of the Almond project.