Kyle Dent

Kyle Dent, Sharoda Paul

In a separate study, we were interested in understanding people's Q&A habits on Twitter. Finding questions within Twitter turned out to be a difficult challenge, so we considered applying some traditional NLP approaches to the problem. On the one hand, Twitter is full of idiosyncrasies, which make processing it difficult. On the other, it is very restricted in length and tends to employ simple syntactic constructions, which could help the performance of NLP processing. In order to find out the viability of NLP and Twitter, we built a pipeline of tools to work specifically with Twitter input for the task of finding questions in tweets. This work is still preliminary, but in this paper we discuss the techniques we used and the lessons we learned.

Kyle Dent

Use of artificial intelligence is growing and expanding into applications that impact people's lives. People trust their technology without really understanding it or its limitations. There is the potential for harm and we are already seeing examples of that in the world. AI researchers have an obligation to consider the impact of intelligent applications they work on. While the ethics of AI is not clear-cut, there are guidelines we can consider to minimize the harm we might introduce.

Kyle Dent, Kalai Ramea

Modern trends in interface design for office equipment using controls on touch surfaces create greater obstacles for blind and visually impaired users and contribute to an environment of dependency in work settings. We believe that \textit{conversational user interfaces} (CUIs) offer a reasonable alternative to touchscreen interactions enabling more access and most importantly greater independence for blind knowledge workers. We present a case study of our work to develop a conversational user interface for accessibility for multifunction printers. We also describe our approach to conversational interfaces in general, which emphasizes task-based collaborative interactions between people and intelligent agents, and we detail the specifics of the solution we created for multifunction printers. To guide our design, we worked with a group of blind and visually impaired individuals starting with focus group sessions to ascertain the challenges our target users face in their professional lives. We followed our technology development with a user study to assess the solution and direct our future efforts. We present our findings and conclusions from the study.