CAI Experts

Thomas Packer, Ph.D.
TP on CAI
Published in
3 min readOct 26, 2019

This story is a rough-draft. Check back later for the fully-polished story.

Here I list all the experts in areas of research, development, and business related to conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) grouped by area of expertise and alphabetized by last name. If you see any omissions, please include them in the comments.

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

CAI Business People and Technical Spokespeople

Neil Balthaser

Works on information retrieval and chatbots.

Ahmed Bouzid

Co-Founder and CEO at Witlingo who help organizations deliver Ubiquitous Voice conversations on platforms like Amazon’s Alexa (Echo) and Google Home.

Dr. Amir Konigsberg

Cofounder and CEO of Twiggle, a search engine that helps ecommerce sites, or an ecommerce site search think the way that customers think.

Dennis Mortensen

CEO and Co-founder of X.ai. He’s a visionary and a great speaker on the topic of CAI, technology, data, etc.

Brian Roemmele

Started building voice enabled computers in the 1980s. Now enabling #VoiceFirst.

Lars Selsås

Norwegian Founder and CEO at Boost AI.

Mark Tucker

Alexa Champion, Bixby Premier Developer, Voice-First Craftsman, Software Architect & Developer, Speaker

CAI Developers

Tom Bocklisch

Head of Engineering @ Rasa.

Steve Worswick

Senior Artificial Intelligence Designer in the UK, five-time winner of the Loebner Prize.

A whole bunch of Rasa developers

CAI Researchers

Y-Lan Boureau

Facebook

Maxine Eskenazi

CMU

Milica Gaši

University of Cambridge

Ilya Gelfenbeyn

Lead Product Manager, Dialogflow at Google. Ilya has been working on conversational agents for over a decade. Focused on supporting conversations with multiple turns servicing multiple backends. Dialogflow is Google’s main platform for extending Google Assistant. It’s a cross-platform tool used by Facebook bots and other assistants. The focus is on the issues of creating true conversations.

Alborz Geramifard

Machine Learning Manager at Amazon. He started building the Alexa that we see today and has built a team to address the challenges presented by longer open-ended conversations, with the goal of advancing conversational AI. The focus is on the less mechanical and transactional to more personalization and natural voice experiences.

Jim Glass

MIT

Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Amazon

Larry Heck

Samsung

Casey Kennington

Boise State University, Computer Science Department

Dan Kondratyuk

Masters student at BSU under Casey Kennington. Specializes in using Neo4j graphs to help in NLU in chatbots.

Nirmal Mukhi

Master Inventor at IBM Watson Education. Applying AI technology to education, primarily focused on tutoring. Working on the harder goal of creating a tutoring experience for any piece of content. These use cases require addressing problems related to creating rich conversational interactions.

Mari Ostendorf

University of Washington

Lazaros C Polymenakos

IBM

Dr. Sid J. Reddy

Conversica

Alexander Rudnicky

Carnegie Mellon University

Ruhi Sarikaya

Amazon

Jason Williams

Apple

Steve Young

Apple

Experts in Related Areas

Andrew Jefferson

Has done deep learning on graphs for question answering.

Join the CAI Dialog on Slack at cai-dialog.slack.com

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Thomas Packer, Ph.D.
TP on CAI

I do data science (QU, NLP, conversational AI). I write applicable-allegorical fiction. I draw pictures. I have a PhD in computer science and I love my family.