<div dir="ltr"><b style="" id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-9ab6e058-7fff-1526-bddd-3131c8766722"><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">************************ </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Call for papers </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-weight:400;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Workshop Title:</span><span style="font-weight:400;font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">      </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Conversational AI: “Today's Practice and Tomorrow's Potential” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Workshop Website:</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">      </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><a href="http://alborz-geramifard.com/workshops/nips18-Conversational-AI">http://alborz-geramifard.com/workshops/nips18-Conversational-AI</a> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Workshop Date:</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">     </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">December 7th</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Workshop Location:</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">    </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Montreal, Canada</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Submission:</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">       </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">    </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><a href="https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CONVERSATIONALAI2018">https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CONVERSATIONALAI2018</a></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Deadline:</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">       </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span class="gmail-Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">    </span></span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">October 25th, 11:59 PM EST </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">************************* </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Description: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">In the span of only a few years, conversational systems have become commonplace. Every day, millions of people use natural-language interfaces such as Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Alexa and others via in-home devices, phones, or messaging channels such as Messenger, Slack, Skype, among others.  At the same time, interest among the research community in conversational systems has blossomed: for supervised and reinforcement learning, conversational systems often serve as both a benchmark task and an inspiration for new ML methods at conferences which don't focus on speech and language per se, such as NIPS, ICML, IJCAI, and others.  Research community challenge tasks are proliferating, including the seventh Dialog Systems Technology Challenge (DSTC7), the Amazon Alexa prize, and the Conversational Intelligence Challenge live competitions at NIPS (2017, 2018).</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Following the overwhelming participation in our NIPS workshop last year (9 invited talks, 26 submissions, 3 orals papers, 13 accepted papers, 37 PC members, and couple of hundreds of participants), we are excited to continue promoting cross-pollination of ideas between academic research centers and industry. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in this area, to clarify impactful research problems, share findings from large-scale real-world deployments, and generate new ideas for future lines of research. This workshop will include invited talks, contributed work, and open discussion.  In these talks, senior technical leaders from both academia and industry will give insights into real usage and challenges at scale.  We will prioritize forward-looking papers that propose interesting and impactful contributions.  We will end the day with an open discussion, including a panel consisting of academic and industrial researchers.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Invited Speakers: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Maxine Eskenazi (Carnegie Mellon University)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Milica Gasic (University of Cambridge)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Mari Ostendorf (University of Washington)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Lazaros C Polymenakos (IBM)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Alexander Rudnicky (Carnegie Mellon University)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Ruhi Sarikaya (Amazon)</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Co-chairs: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Alborz Geramifard (Amazon)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Jason Williams (Apple) </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Organizers:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Y-Lan Boureau (Facebook)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Maxine Eskenazi (CMU)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Milica Gašić (University of Cambridge)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Jim Glass (MIT)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Dilek Hakkani-Tur (Amazon)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Larry Heck (Samsung)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Lazaros C Polymenakos (IBM)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="font-weight:normal;line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">• Steve Young (Apple)</span></p><br><br></b><br></div>