12/8/2020
Monica Lam will be giving an invited talk at the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling).
11/17/2020
Mehrad Moradshahi presented
Localizing Open-Ontology QA Semantic Parsers in a Day Using Machine Translation
at the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
11/16/2020
Silei Xu and Sina J. Semnani presented
AutoQA: From Databases To Q&A Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data
at the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
10/26/2020
Monica Lam interviewed by Bret Kinsella for Voicebot.AI
Stanford Professor Monica Lam on the Almond Open Source Voice Assistant – Voicebot Podcast Ep 175
10/21/2020
Jackie Yang presented
DoThisHere: Multimodal Interaction to Improve Cross-Application Tasks on Mobile Devices at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST).
10/21/2020
Silei Xu presented
Schema2QA: High-Quality and Low-Cost Q&A Agents for the Structured Web
at the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM).
10/15/2020
Giovanni Campagna interviewed by Christine Preusler for HostingAdvice.com:
"Stanford’s Almond: An Open, Privacy-Centric Assistant that Allows Users to Personalize Commands, Installation, and Server Set-Up "
9/26/2020
Giovanni Campagna interviewed by Giorgio Robino for convcomp.it and Voicebot.ai:
"What’s Next for Stanford University Open-Source Virtual Assistant Almond: An Interview with Principal Developer Giovanni Campagna "
9/14/2020
Two papers from OVAL were accepted and will appear in EMNLP 2020:
AutoQA: From Databases To Q&A Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data
and
Localizing Open-Ontology QA Semantic Parsers in a Day Using Machine Translation
8/28/2020
Congratulations to Dr. Michael Fischer for earning his Ph.D degree!
8/4/2020
Congratulations to the Chirpy Cardinal team, led by Ashwin Paranjape, Abigail See, and Christopher Manning, for winning the 2nd Place in the Alexa Prize.
7/10/2020
Monica Lam gave an invited talk, Let's Build an Open Programmable Virtual Assistant with Privacy , at the First Workshop on Natural Language Interfaces in the ACL 2020 conference.
7/6/2020
Giovanni Campagna presented Zero-Shot Transfer Learning with Synthesized Data for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking
6/30/2020
We received a grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to build a usable open-source virtual assistant! Announcement .
4/29/2020
Jackie Yang presented our paper Soundr: Head Position and Orientation Prediction Using a Microphone Array
4/27/2020
Yelp became a partner of the Open Virtual Assistant Initiative and granted us access to their data.
4/4/2020
Almond 1.8 was released. Release notes .
2/14/2020
We participated as sponsors and mentors in the TreeHacks Hackathon . 3 teams used Almond technology in their project; we awarded a $500 prize to the best Almond project.
12/3/2020
Popular Science Magazine gave the 32nd Annual Best of What's New awards in Security to the Stanford Almond project!
11/13/2019
Home Assistant announced their partnership with Almond at the Home Assistant State of The Union Conference .
11/8/2019
Almond 1.7 was released. Release notes .
10/30/2019
We hosted the First Open Virtual Assistant Workshop. Blog .
6/14/2019
John Markoff wrote our NSF funding news in the New York Times:
"Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri With a Privacy-Minded Alternative ",
6/4/2019
Monica Lam spoke with Russ Altman in the Future of Everything podcast,
"Privacy in the age of virtual assistants "
4/1/2019
We received a $3M research award from NSF for the project Autonomy and Privacy with Open Federated Virtual Assistants
2/7/2019
Congratulations to Monica Lam for her election to the 2019 class of the National Academy of Engineering.
1/21/2019
Monica Lam gave a keynote at HiPEAC 2019,
"Giving Control Back to Consumers with Open Federated Virtual Assistants "
11/1/2018
Monica Lam gave a Keynote at Mobicom 2018, "Keeping the Internet Open with an Open-Source Virtual Assistant ",