Marilyn’s Artificial Intelligence
On the pastoral campus of the University of California Santa Cruz, Professor Marilyn Walker is a force behind the burgeoning major of Artificial Intelligence. In fact her face, thirty feet tall, graces the wall of the International boarding terminal at San Jose International Airport as she screen writes formulas. It also dots areas around the campus itself. Clearly, there’s a new Marilyn in town. By Kimberly Wainscoat Professor Marilyn Walker We spoke at her picturesque home on the campus, where she is a tenured, Ivy and Stanford educated professor. As an early pioneer in Palo Alto technology companies such as Hewlett Packard and AT&T Bell Labs, Marilyn is also a sought after consultant in the booming area of Artificial Intelligence. Her body of work includes statistical methods for dialog optimization and expressive generation for dialog. To the layperson, think Alexa, Siri or Ok Google. Simply put, she is helping to lead the way for informative human-computer conversat...