Next-generation Intelligent Assistants for Wearable Devices
Xin Luna Dong
Meta Reality Labs
Talk
Xin Luna Dong is a Principal Scientist at Meta Reality Labs, leading the ML efforts in building an intelligent personal assistant. She has spent more than a decade building knowledge graphs, such as the Amazon Product Graph and the Google Knowledge Graph. She has co-authored books "Machine Knowledge: Creation and Curation of Comprehensive Knowledge Bases" and “Big Data Integration”. She was named an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow for "significant contributions to knowledge graph construction and data integration", awarded the VLDB Women in Database Research Award and VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award. She has given keynotes and tutorials in conferences of various communities, like VLDB, KDD, WSDM, WebConf and ACL. She serves in the PVLDB advisory committee, was a member of the VLDB endowment, a PC co-chair for KDD’2022 ADS track, WSDM’2022, VLDB’2021, and Sigmod’2018.
An intelligent assistant shall be an agent that knows you and the world, can receive your requests or predict your needs, and provide you the right services at the right time with your permission. As smart devices such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Ray-ban Meta get popular, Intelligent Assistants are gradually playing an important role in people's lives. The Emergence of wearable devices brings more opportunities and calls for the next generation of Intelligent Assistants.
In this talk, we discuss the many challenges and opportunities we face to grow intelligent assistants from voice-only to multi-modal, from context-agnostic to context-aware, from listening to the users' requests to predicting the user's needs, and from server-side to on-device. Our approach leverages and extends large language models (LLMs). We discuss our LLM-based solutions toward multi-modality, contextualization, personalization, and retrieval-augmentation, and discuss how they are enabled on devices. We expect these new challenges to open doors to new research areas and start a new chapter for providing personal assistance services.