Our vision uses Alexa’s massive untapped potential to bring you a talking virtual companion who learns, grows, is curious about the world, and, more importantly, your outlook on it. We’re a team of four with diverse backgrounds in computer science and computational linguistics. For us, the next few months are going to be a blast, filled with code, coffee and lengthy discussions in our offices overlooking the Alps.
Alessandra C. - Team leader
During her first MSc in Linguistics, Alessandra had the crazy idea to write a dissertation that connected ASR and NLU. Naturally this required a tremendous amount of learning, but she had so much fun, she started another MSc in speech technologies. Apparently she still loves research very much since after one year in the industry she quit to pursue a PhD in CS, and she plans to have a whale of a time playing with virtual agents. In her spare time, you can spot Alessandra in small theatres either impersonating characters on stage or writing them down for a play.
Enrico G.
I am a Programmer. I love to design and write programs and see how every single module, function and line of code falls into place, in endless forms most beautiful. This is why I’ve been attracted to informatics since a very young age and after years of studies in this field it still keeps me passionate. Generally, my main interests are distributed systems and web development, but lately I became fascinated by natural language processing and the careful work of machine learning involved. This project offers me a chance to test and expand my abilities in this new, exciting field.
Giuliano T.
After a Bachelor in CS, where I focused on Web Development, I went on for a MSc in Data science, since I had always wanted to learn more about Data Mining and Big Data. During the master, I became particularly interested in Machine Learning and its applications, but the course I loved the most was also the most difficult one I had ever taken: Language Understanding Systems. Obviously, I decided to write my dissertation on it and to do an internship in the lab that developed such systems. As you might have guessed, I love challenges.
Stefano M.
Since the beginning of my studies my main interests have been Logic and Languages and their applications to Informatics. During my career I have tried to focus on these topics by choosing exams involving language processing, grammars and logical foundations of computer science. In my Master's program I've also developed a big interest for machine learning, big data and pattern recognition. My main goal as a student is to see as many applications of these fields as possible, which is why I'm trying to focus on projects involving NLP and dialogue managers, which represent a good meeting point for all my interests.
Giuseppe Riccardi - Faculty advisor
Giuseppe Riccardi is a Professor of Computer Science and the founder and director of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab.
