Wolf Paulus’ Journal

Hi there and thanks so much for stopping by!
My name is Wolf Paulus, I’m a software engineer, innovator and educator based in Sedona, Arizona (consequently a hiker and photographer). This is my journal, where I share thoughts and ideas on technology.
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I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Embry-Riddle. Occasionally, I speak at conferences on topics ranging from Embedded/Mobile Technology to Emotional Prosody and Voice and Conversational User Interfaces.

LATELY / UPCOMING

April 12-13, 2022 Conversational Interaction Conference

The CI Conference #CIcon2022 was taking place in the Heart of Silicon Valley, focusing on major AI trends in conversing with computers in human language.
My talk was titled Onward to Conversational Applications
When in the nineties, companies started publishing their websites, they needed people with a new skill set: Webmasters.
Today, this dated job title has morphed into a broad field of tech employment, including graphic design, search engine optimization, content strategy. Most of what early Webmasters did, is now handled by content management systems like WordPress. Modern websites are rather web applications and interaction logic has moved from the backend to the web browser.
This talk explores how much the above mentioned trends can already be observed developing Conversational and Voice User Interfaces and how a new approach to API design may make the “Webmasters for VUI” obsolete.
Shallow CUIs and VUIs are today’s goofy static web pages that need to be replaced by full-blown conversational applications.
November, 2020, Voice! 2020

VOICE Summit is the leading annual event bringing together 5,000 of the voice tech industry’s top creators, developers, designers, marketers and executives.
I talked about “Striving for likability” Over the next decade, the ambient computing era will eclipse the PC era. Information will be available everywhere, accessible frictionless and frustration-free through voice user interfaces. However, many of the old recipes for creating delight don’t apply to Voice-first or Voice-Only experiences.
..
November 13, 2020 AWS Community Day

The AWS Community Day is a regional conference organized and attended by AWS practitioners and its primary objective is peer-to-peer learning. This year’s US Western region AWS community day will be fully online. On Friday, November 13, 2020, I will be talking about the one AWS Lambda function that rules them all. showing the python implementation of an AWS Lambda function, performing things like: serving an HTML page,  consuming HTTP Post requests (sent from that page HTML page), calling other AWS Lambda functions, securely storing received data in a DynamoDB, synthesizing text into speech, i.e. returning an MP3, calling a native library or executable that was deployed with the lambda function .. and more.
Digital Conversations with Billy Bateman

During this episode of Digital Conversations with Billy Bateman, I had the opportunity to talk about some principles of Voice User Interfaces and the importance of setting expectations.

Many of the new concepts I’m working on, are communicated best through video clips or short films.
Take a look at some short HD films that I have created over the last few months and years.


“Amateur Professionalism”, a concept used since 2004, describes an emerging sociological and economic trend of people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards. That pretty much describes, how I look at my photography work today.
If you like, take a look at some of my photos and the stories they tell.


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