Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Skilling Auditorium, Stanford Campus
http://ee380.stanford.edu

Bing Dialog Model: Intent, Knowledge and Interaction

Henry Shum
Microsoft
About the talk:

The decade-old Internet search outcomes, manifested in the document-centric form of "ten blue links," are no longer sufficient for Internet users. Many studies have shown that when users are ushered off the conventional search result pages through blue links, their needs are often partially met at best in a "hit-or-miss" fashion. To tackle this challenge, we have designed Bing (www.bing.comi), Microsoft's search engine, to not just navigate users to a landing page through a blue link but to continue engaging with users to clarify intent and facilitate task completion with Bing's deep understanding of the underlying entities and domains of user interest.

Powering this new paradigm is the Bing Dialog Model that consists of three building blocks: an indexing system that comprehensively collects information from the web and systematically harvests knowledge, an intent model that statistically infers user intent and predicts next action based on the harvested knowledge, and an interaction model that elicits user intent through mathematically optimized presentations of web information and knowledge that matches user needs.

In this talk, I'll describe Bing Dialog Model in details and demonstrate it in action through innovative features, in particular by applying social contexts and entity understanding for user task completion. Time permitting, I will share some challenges and opportunities in building Bing as a compelling brand in consumer internet services.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Former managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Harry Shum, a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft now, has taken the new role of leading the Core Search Development of Microsoft.

Dr. Shum is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow. He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Vision, and is a Program Chair of the International Conference of Computer Vision (ICCV) 2007. Dr. Shum has published more than 100 papers in computer vision, computer graphics, pattern recognition, statistical learning, and robotics. He holds more than 50 U.S. patents.

Dr. Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 where he worked in Redmond, WA as a researcher on computer vision and computer graphics. In 1999, Shum moved to Beijing to help start Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). His tenure there began as a research manager and subsequently moved up to Assistant Managing Director, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, Distinguished Engineer, and Corporate Vice President. In 2007, Shum became Microsoft Corporate Vice President, and was lauded for his leadership in technology and management.

Dr. Shum received a doctorate in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. In his spare time, he enjoys playing basketball, rooting for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and spending quality time with his family.

Contact information:

Henry Shum
Microsoft