09:00-09:05


09:05 - 09:40




9:40 - 10:30

Welcome [See Spotlight Videos, Papers, Photos, Presentations]


T1: Keynote Talk #1

Towards Open World Video Event Understanding - Flexible Representations and Commonsense Priors, Prof, Sudeep Sarkar, University of South Florida


Paper Spotlights 1

F-1: Pratik Jayarao and Arpit Sharma. Retraining DistilBERT for a Voice Shopping Assistant by Using Universal Dependencies [20 mins]


F-2: Shih-Han Chan, Tsai-Lun Yang, Yun-Wei Chu, Chi-Yang Hsu, Ting-Hao Huang, Yu-Shian Chiu and Lun-Wei Ku. Let’s Talk! Striking Up Conversations via Conversational Visual Question Generation [20 mins]


S-1: Hung-Ting Chen, Yu-Chieh Chao, Ta-Hsuan Chao and Wei-Yun Ma. Predict and Use Latent Patterns for Short-Text Conversation [10 mins]

10:30 - 10:45

*** Coffee Break / Open Discussions ***

10:45 - 11:20




11:20 - 11:50

T2: Keynote Talk #2

How Symbolic AI and ML can combine for the Design of Conversational Agents at Scale, Dr. Tathagata Chakraborti, IBM Research


Moderated Discussion: Role of Chatbots During COVID

  • Dr. Kalai Ramea, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Xerox

  • Venkataraman Sundareswaran, MCHC Fellow, AI & Machine Learning, World Economic Forum

  • Moderator: Prof. Biplav Srivastava, AI Institute, University of South Carolina

11:50 - 12:00

*** Coffee Break / Open Discussions ***

12:00 - 12:35


12:35 - 13:05






13:05 - 13:40

T3: Invited Talk #3

BEBO: A benefits chatbot to help unemployed people during COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Kalai Ramea, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Xerox

Paper Spotlights 2

S-2: Roshni Ramnani, Sakshi Jain, Shubhashis Sengupta and Sukanti Beer. RHEA TVA - A Platform for designing Virtual Agents with Intelligent Actions [10 mins]

S-3: Yunmo Chen, Sixing Lu, Fan Yang, Xiaojiang Huang, Xing Fan and Chenlei Guo. Pattern-aware Data Augmentation for Query Rewriting in Voice Assistant Systems [10 mins]

S-4: Francesca Alloatti, Luigi Di Caro and Alessio Bosca. Conversation Analysis, Repair Sequences and Human Computer Interaction - A theoretical framework and an empirical proposal of action [10 mins]


T4: Keynote Talk #4

Conversations with Data: Toward more contextual and interactive natural language interfaces, Dr. Ahmed Awadallah, Microsoft Research

13:40 - 14:00

*** Coffee Break / Open Discussions ***

14:00 - 14:35




14:35 - 15:15





15:15 - 15:30

T5: Keynote Talk #5

Do We Really Want Human-Machine Argumentation Dialogues?, Prof. John Licato, University of South Florida


Panel Discussion

Chatbots and Society

  • Panelists: Prof, Sudeep Sarkar, Prof. John Licato, Dr. Ahmed Awadallah, Dr. Kalai Ramea, Dr. Tathagata Chakraborti

  • ´Moderator: Dr. Imed Zitouni, Google



Wrap-up with closing comments

Note: All Times are presented in the Eastern Time Zone (EST).