Vittorio Perera

I am currently a Lead Software Engineer at Salesforce where, through my expertise in NLP and building voice agents, I am contributing to Agentforce. I joined Salesforce through the acqusition of Tenyx (you can read all about it here). I was lucky to join Tenyx as the second engineer on the team and during its two years I helped de-risk our initial idea (build a voice agent natively powered by an LLM), build a first POC, develop it into a real product and deliver it to our customers.

Previously, I worked as applied scientist at Amazon Lab 126 in the Alexa Conversations group. During my tenure at Amazon I focused on controllable–both semantically and stylistically–natural language generation (NLG) at scale.

Before joining the workforce, I earned my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University working with Prof. Manuela Veloso. My thesis explored how to enable bidirectional human-robot interaction. In the human-to-robot direction, I developed algorithms to let a mobile service robot understand requests to perform tasks, and questions about its experience. In the robot-to-human direction, I enabled the robot to provide explanations about the task it executed with a level of detail that matches the user’s request.

Prior to CMU, I was a master student in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Sapienza University in Rome where I also got my B.S. in Computer Engeneering.

News

Oct 1, 2024	After a bit more than 2 years Tenyx was successfully acquired by Salesforce. While I will continue building voice agent, it will be in the context of the world’s #1 CRM. See the official announcement here!!
Jul 1, 2022	After almost four great years at Amazon I have joined Tenyx. Looking forward to build the next generation of intelligent voice-based agents!
Mar 1, 2022	Launching a first version of the website

Selected Publications

INLG

Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation

Du, Yuheng, Oraby, Shereen, Perera, Vittorio, Shen, Minmin, Narayan-Chen, Anjali, Chung, Tagyoung, Venkatesh, Anushree, and Hakkani-Tur, Dilek

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation 2020

Bib

@inproceedings{du-etal-2020-schema,
  abbr = {INLG},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  title = {Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation},
  author = {Du, Yuheng and Oraby, Shereen and Perera, Vittorio and Shen, Minmin and Narayan-Chen, Anjali and Chung, Tagyoung and Venkatesh, Anushree and Hakkani-Tur, Dilek},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  selected = {true}
}

AAAI

Multi-Task Learning for Parsing the Alexa Meaning Representation Language

Perera, Vittorio, Chung, Tagyoung, Kollar, Thomas, and Strubell, Emma

In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18) 2018

Bib

@inproceedings{perera2018multi,
  abbr = {AAAI},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  title = {Multi-Task Learning for Parsing the Alexa Meaning Representation Language},
  author = {Perera, Vittorio and Chung, Tagyoung and Kollar, Thomas and Strubell, Emma},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Second {AAAI} Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18)},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {{AAAI} Press},
  selected = {true}
}

Robotics

Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access

Perera, Vittorio, Soetens, Robin, Kollar, Thomas, Samadi, Mehdi, Sun, Yichao, Nardi, Daniele, Molengraft, René, and Veloso, Manuela

Robotics 2015

Bib

@article{perera2015learning,
  abbr = {Robotics},
  bibtex_show = {true},
  title = {Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access},
  author = {Perera, Vittorio and Soetens, Robin and Kollar, Thomas and Samadi, Mehdi and Sun, Yichao and Nardi, Daniele and van de Molengraft, Ren{\'e} and Veloso, Manuela},
  journal = {Robotics},
  year = {2015},
  publisher = {Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute},
  selected = {true}
}