Douwe Kiela (@douwekiela, https://douwekiela.github.io/) is the Head of Research at Hugging Face and an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His current research interests lie in developing better models for (grounded, multi-agent) language understanding and building better tools for evaluation and benchmarking.
[Whova link]
Abstract In this talk I will present a vision for acquiring perceptually grounded meaning in machines, as a key next challenge for natural language processing. I will cover some recent work that tries to improve how we do model evaluation in multimodal settings, focusing on the new Adversarial VQA and Winoground evaluation datasets. After that, I will talk about our latest large-scale vision and language “foundation model”, called FLAVA: a single holistic universal transformer that targets all modalities at once and that shows impressive performance on a wide range of tasks.
Yoelle Maarek is a Vice President at Amazon, heading research for Alexa Shopping. Prior to this, she was Vice President of Research at Yahoo, guiding the research teams worldwide. Prior to Yahoo, she was the first Google engineer in Israel and opened the Haifa engineering office. One of the most notable features her team launched is Google Suggest, the query auto-completion service. Before Google, she was with IBM Research, first in the US, then in Israel, holding a number of positions from Research Staff Member to Distinguished Engineer. She has been serving in various senior roles at leading academic research conferences in search and data mining, such as SIGIR, WWW and WSDM. She is a member of the Technion Board of Governors and was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2013 and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021. Yoelle obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel in 1989, holds an engineering degree from the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, and a DEA (graduate degree) in Computer Science from Paris VI university, both awarded in 1985.
Abstract In this talk, I will present the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which allows selected academic teams to develop TaskBots. TaskBots are agents that interact with Alexa users who require assistance (via “Alexa, let’s work together”) to complete everyday tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions, such as cooking and home improvement. One of the unique elements of this challenge is its multi-modal nature, where users receive both verbal guidance and visual instructions, when a screen is available (e.g., on Echo Show devices). Some of the hard AI challenges the teams addressed included leveraging domain knowledge, tacking dialogue state, supporting adaptive and robust conversations and probably the most relevant to this conference: handling multi-modal interactions.
Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist. She holds a Ph.D. from the Media Lab at MIT. She is the first female computer scientist in Spain to be named an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an ACM Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence and a IEEE Fellow. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and the fourth and youngest female member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2018 she was named Engineer of the Year by the Professional Association of Telecommunication Engineers of Spain and she received an honorary doctorate from the University Miguel Hernandez. She is well known for her work in computational models of human behavior, human computer-interaction, intelligent user interfaces, mobile computing and big data for social good. She is the named inventor of 41 patents. She is a frequent keynote speaker both for technical and non-technical audiences. She regularly collaborates with and is featured by the media. She is very passionate about the power of technology to improve our quality of life, both individually and collectively. She invests significant effort in outreach efforts to make technology more accessible to non technical audiences and to inspire young people –and particularly girls– to pursue careers in technology.
Abstract
In my talk, I will describe the work that I did between March 2020 and April 2022, leading a multi-disciplinary team of 20+ volunteer scientists working very closely with the Presidency of the Valencian Government in Spain on 4 large areas: (1) human mobility modeling; (2) computational epidemiological models (both metapopulation, individual and LSTM-based models); (3) predictive models; and (4) a large-scale, online citizen surveys called the COVID19impactsurvey (https://covid19impactsurvey.org) with over 720,000 answers worldwide. This survey has enabled us to shed light on the impact that the pandemic is having on people’s lives [3,4,5].
I will present the results obtained in each of these four areas, including winning the 500K XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge [1] and obtaining a best paper award at ECML-PKDD 2021 [2]. I will share the lessons learned in this very special initiative of collaboration between the civil society at large (through the survey), the scientific community (through the Expert Group) and a public administration (through the Commissioner at the Presidency level).
For those interested in knowing more, WIRED magazine published an extensive article describing our story: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/valencia-ai-covid-data.
