Title of talk: Automating Human Communication Processes

Abstract:

As computer scientists and customers, we take the automation of data processing in today’s businesses and organizations for granted. Most of the time, little or no human involvement is required in billing, factory automation, supply chain management, warehousing, document dissemination, insurance claims processing, sensory data processing in cars or power plants, and a myriad of other applications. However, most complex automated business processes call for human intervention at certain points in time to allow humans to make important decisions that cannot or have not been automated, to convey important information to human decision makers and to gather feedback from them to steer further processing. However, automation largely does not extend to the resulting human communication processes. Instead, large parts of these communication processes still require traditional, labor-intensive, slow, and sub-optimal human effort. In this talk, I want to sensitize the audience to the importance and unique challenges of automating human communication processes. This is a new and exciting frontier in computer science that has rarely been covered in computer science textbooks and research articles.

Summer Internship Program:

Avaya is a global business communications company. It has an R&D organization with about 2000 professionals in various global locations.

Avaya Labs Research is a small part of the Avaya R&D organization with most of its members in New Jersey, U.S.A.   Every year in the summer, Avaya Labs Research offers a limited number of summer internships to students in computer science and related disciplines. Our summer interns participate in ongoing research projects on a conceptual and implementation level.

If you are interested in a summer intern position at Avaya Labs Research, please contact Reinhard Klemm at klemm@avaya.com. For more information on Avaya and Avaya Labs Research, go to www.avaya.com and www.research.avayalabs.com, respectively.