“Haven’t Siri, Cortana and Amazon Echo solved the problem of spoken interaction? If you use these systems, they haven’t solved the problem. They don’t produce objects that we can talk about, or collaborate on, or reason about. These are the works in progress. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have a conversation with the computer?”
— Barbara Di Eugenio, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, speaking to students at University Park on Nov. 11. Her presentation, "Towards a dialogue system that supports rich visualizations of data," was about her research on creating natural language processing systems to allow computers to visually answer questions from natural human conversation.