David Sadek
David Sadek is director of research of Institut Telecom (http://www.institut-telecom.fr/en_accueil.html). He is also chairman of the evaluation committee of the "Digital content and interactions" program of the French National Research Agency (ANR). Formerly, he was delegate director for research at Orange Labs. Doctor in computer science and specialist in artificial intelligence, knowledge technologies and cognitive science, he created and led for fifteen years research teams on human-computer dialogue and intelligent agents. He also conducted several programs of technology transfer and service deployment in these domains, and had been a major player in the standardization initiatives for software agents' technologies.
The promising research results achieved over the 90's in the area of human-machine dialogue had generated strong expectations regarding the imminent emergence of artificial agents able to engage into natural interactions with a human partner. However, more than ten years later, these so-called intelligent interactive systems are not yet in our everyday life. What really happened? What are the reasons for this discrepancy with respect to the initial roadmap? What was the actual content of the scientific advances compared to the requirements for effective operational systems? What are the technological breakthroughs yet to achieve and the underlying scientific challenges to address, especially in the field of knowledge processing, in order to bridge the gap toward interactive cognitive agents that meet end-user needs? This talk tackles such issues and provides some tentative answers.
