German I. Parisi
Program Director, Product Management, IBM watsonx
Program Director, Artificial Intelligence, IBM Data and AI
Co-founder and former Board Member, ContinualAI
I’m passionate about developing innovative and impactful systems that are interactive by design and delightful by experience.
I’m currently Program Director of Artificial Intelligence at IBM Data and AI and Product Manager for watsonx. I work on conversational technologies where AI/ML-powered algorithms learn from millions of real-world human-agent interaction examples.
I believe in the transformational power of quantum computing and its incredible potential to disrupt and advance artificial intelligence. In particular, what does post-quantum (continual) machine learning look like?
Some background:
In 2019, our Mountain View-based start-up Apprente Inc. was acquired by McDonald's Corporation with the mission to advance state-of-the-art ML, AI, and related technology solutions that address real-world, data-driven needs in the McDonald’s Restaurant environment and completely transform the customer experience (Press coverage: TechCrunch - WIRED - Business Insider - Yahoo - Forbes).
My 2020 interview on Fortune about the future of QSR and drive-thru automation, and on McD Tech Labs' mission and projects: WIRED, CNN.
I'm the co-founder and former Board Member of ContinualAI, the largest non-profit research organization on continual learning for artificial intelligence with over 2000 active users, online seminars, sponsored workshops, and the community behind Avalanche, an open-source CL library based on PyTorch.
In 2021, my co-authors and I received the Best Article Award from the International Neural Network Society for our paper on continual learning.
In 2021, our R&D division at McDonald's Corporation, McD Tech Labs, was acquired by IBM, and in 2022 our voice-activated solution became part of the watsonx portfolio.
- On McD Tech Labs' acquisition and McD's strategic partnership with IBM: 2020/10 CNBC
Selected Publications
Churamani, Dimlioglu, Parisi, Gunes. (2023)
Continual Facial Expression Recognition: A Benchmark.arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.06448Lomonaco et al. (2021)Avalanche: an end-to-end library for continual learning.IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
Parisi, G.I., Kemker, R., Part, J.L., Kanan, C., Wermter, S. (2019)Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review. - Best Article AwardNeural Networks 133:54-71. [arXiv:1802.07569]
Barros, P., Parisi, G.I., Wermter, S. (2019) A Personalized Affective Memory Model for Improving Emotion Recognition.ICML'19, Long Beach, CA.
Parisi, G.I., Tani, J., Weber, C., Wermter, S. (2018)Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations with Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization.Frontiers in Neurorobotics 12:78 [arXiv:1805.10966]
Parisi, G.I., Barros, P., Fu, D., Magg., S. Wu, H., Liu, X., Wermter, S. (2018)A Neurorobotic Experiment for Crossmodal Conflict Resolution in Complex Environments.IEEE/RSJ IROS'18, Madrid, Spain [arXiv:1802.10408]
Organized Events & Special Issues
March 2022 Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction - Second Edition@ ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) - Virtual
March 2021 Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction@ ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) - Virtual
June 2020 [CFP] Special Issue: Lifelong Learning and Long-Term Human-Robot InteractionFrontiers in Robotics and AI, Psychology
2020-09-04 Workshop on Lifelong Learning for Long-term Human-Robot Interaction@ RO-MAN 2020 in Naples, Italy
2020-06-14 Workshop on Continual Learning in Computer Vision@ CVPR 2020, Seattle, WA
2019 - [CFP] Research Topic: "Closing the Loop: From Human Behavior to Multisensory Robots"Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Psychology, and Neuroscience
2018-10-05 - Workshop on Crossmodal Learning for Intelligent Robotics @ IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)'18, Madrid, Spain
2018-09-08 - Workshop on Intelligent Assistive Systems @ IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI-IJCNN) '18, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2018 - [CFP] Special Issue on Crossmodal Learning Cognitive Systems Research journal (Elsevier)
2017-09-18 - Workshop on Computational Models for Crossmodal Learning @ Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EPIROB) '17, Lisbon, Portugal
Invited Seminars
2020-01-31 "Towards Lifelong Conversational AI", RE-WORK Applied AI Summit 2020, San Francisco, CA, USA
2019-04-16 "Lifelong Continual Learning with Neural Networks", tutorial at the INNS Big Data and Deep Learning 2019, Sestri Levante, Genoa, Italy
2018-09-20 "Lifelong Continual Learning with Neural Networks", RE-WORK Deep Learning Summit, London, UK
2018-06-23 "Lifelong Learning on Humanoid Robots", Dept. of Computer Science, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
2018-03-16 "Continual Learning of Representations with Deep Neural Network Self-Organization", Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
2017-07-11 "Deep Neural Network Self-Organization for Lifelong (Multimodal) Learning", Kreiman's Lab, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
2015-11-20 "A neurocognitive assistive robot: Human action learning with neural network self-organization", Asada Laboratory, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.
2015-11-10 "Emergence of multimodal cognitive representations from neural network self-organization", Cognitive Neuro-Robotics Lab, KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea.
2014-12-18 "Neurocognitive assistive robotics", Dept. of Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematical Logic, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
2014-12-11 "Neural integration of pose-motion features for human action recognition", Slipguru, Universita' di Genova, Genoa, Italy.