Conversational system on a robotic platform

Unit: XTIN
 
Proposers:
Matthias Galle (Matthias.Galle@xerox.com)
Christophe Legras (Christophe.Legras@xerox.com)

Duration: 4 - 6 months
Start Date: Q1 2016

Description

The Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) has a strong expertise in
Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. We have been
applying these capabilities in many business applications and lately
have worked on developing conversational software to work in the
customer care domain.

The internship proposal aims at integrating our conversational
software to a third party robotic platform and to experiment on how to
take advantage of the robot movements and postures capacities.

 In this internship, the intern will focus on some of the following
 tasks in collaboration with the other team members:

- Integrate the current version of XRCE conversational software in the
      robotic platform and test its usability
- Tune the software components involved in the conversation (Automatic
      Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Dialogue
      Manager, Natural Language Generation and Speech Synthesis).

- Use the features offered by the robotic platform to improve the user
      experience

- Publication of findings in the form of papers and/or intellectual
      property is strongly encouraged

 
The intern will be part of a team of developers, researchers and
marketers. XRCE projects are managed with an agile methodology which
allow interns to follow all the steps of software development,
including research, design, implementation, test and integration.

 

Candidates will be:

 - Students in Computer Sciences Engineering\Bsc\Masters
 - Experience of Object Oriented Programming: Python and C++ in
      particular
 - Knowledge in client/server architectures, web-services
 - Basic robotics knowledge
 - Knowledge in Agile methodologies and Test Driven Development is a
      plus

During her/his internship the candidate will acquire a significant
knowledge in natural language processing, machine learning techniques
and challenges linked to robotic platforms while working closely with
researchers and engineers. Her/his work will also be exposed to
feedback and suggestion from customer care experts and clients.