InhaltsangabeDialogue system theory.- Maintaining state.- Maintaining state - optimizations.- Policy design.- Evaluation.- Parameter learning.

Blaise Thomson is a Research Fellow at St John's College in the University of Cambridge. He obtained a Bachelors degree in Pure Mathematics, Computer Science, Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, before completing an MPhil at the University of Cambridge in 2006 and a PhD in Statistical Dialogue Modelling in 2010.  He has published around 35 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, focusing largely on the topics of dialogue management, automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language understanding and collaborative filtering. In 2008 he was awarded the IEEE Student Spoken Language Processing award for his paper at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) and in 2010 he co-authored best papers at both the IEEE Spoken Language Technologies workshop and Interspeech. He was co-chair of the 2009 ACL Student Research Workshop and co-presented a tutorial on POMDP dialogue management at Interspeech 2009.In his spare time, he enjoys playing guitar and dancing and represented England at the 2010, 2011 and 2012 world formation Latin championships.