ABSTRACT:

It is immensely empowering to delegate information processing and automation work to machines and have them carry out difficult tasks on our behalf. But programming computers is hard. The traditional approach to this problem is to try to fix people: They should work harder to learn to code. In this talk, I argue that a promising alternative is to meet people partway. Specifically, powerful new approaches to machine learning provide ways to infer intent from disparate signals and, with your help, could help make it easier for everyone to get computational help with their vexing problems.