DR. ROBERTO PIERACCINI is a world-recognized technologist who pushed the boundaries of human-machine speech communication by pioneering the use of statistical machine learning for language understanding and dialog, both in scientific and commercial contexts. He has served as Director of Advanced Conversational Technoligies at IBM T. J. Watson Research Labs. He was the CTO of SpeechCycle, a company that created among the most sophisticated speech and multi-modal automated customer care applications. He also served as the CEO of the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. He has authored many scientific publications in speech and multi-modal technologies, and is the author of The Voice in the Machine (MIT Press) on building computers that understand speech. He is now the Director of Advanced Conversational Technologies at Jibo, Inc.