Wednesday / CS Distinguished Lecture

May 8th / 12:00 PM

Hybrid / Mudd 3514

Speaker

Monica Lam, Stanford University

Talk Title

Trustworthy Conversational Chatbots for Your Data with Generative AI

Abstract

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has both inspired and alarmed knowledge workers. LLM-based chatbots generating false information and hallucinating have garnered widespread attention, raising questions about the reliability of LLMs as chatbots and virtual assistants.

The Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab has created an open-source Knowledge Engine, powered by an LLM, that can provide a reliable conversational chatbot to any structured or unstructured data. It can also assist writers by drafting full-length Wikipedia-like articles from scratch with breadth and depth. Public demos created with our Knowledge Engine include: WikiChat grounded in Wikipedia, Yelpbot grounded in Yelp, the STORM writing assistant grounded in the Internet, and Noora, a coach for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (https://oval.cs.stanford.edu).

Biography

Dr. Monica Lam is the Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford, in the Departments of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering. She is the Faculty Director of the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Laboratory and a faculty member of the Natural Language Processing Group at Stanford. She received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Prof. Lam is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an ACM Fellow. She has received numerous best paper awards, and has published over 150 papers in areas including natural language processing, machine learning, compilers, computer architecture, operating systems, high-performance computing, and HCI. She co-authored the "Dragon Book", the definitive text on compiler technology. She was on the founding team of Tensilica, the first startup in configurable processor cores. Prof. Lam's research on privacy-preserving virtual assistants earned Popular Science's Best of What's New Award in Security in 2019.

Research Area/Interests

Natural language processing; programming languages

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