Does AI need a body? Debate at the VU, 9 Dec
Most applications of AI do not have a face or a body and it is mostly a “hidden” system that is difficult to relate to for people. In this debate, we discuss whether AI needs a body. Are there any benefits, what are the differences with virtual AI, how difficult is it and how can we make progress in science and technology development? Several panellists will present their view and have a moderated debate with students and colleagues.
Friday 9 Dec, 15h-17h30, Aurora, HG-0C29, VU Amsterdam. See here for details
Birna van Riemsdijk wraps up VIDI project with symposium on “Being human in the digital society: on technology, norms and us”.
Birna van Riemsdijk (Univ. of Twente) wrapped up her VIDI project with a symposium on “Being human in the digital society: on technology, norms and us”. Various HI members participated and contributed. There’s a brief report on the symposium, including a 10min video on the project.
Selene Baez member of winnng team for ISWC knowledge graph construction challenge
Selene Baez from the CTLT team at the VU was member of the all-VU team that won the challenge at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) on constructing symbolic knowledge graphs from neural large language models. Their paper “Prompting as probing” describing their results can be found here.
HI team wins argument mining challenge at COLING 2022
A team consisting of HI members Michiel van der Meer, Urja Khurana, Lea Krause and Selene Baez, together with their VU colleague Myrthe Reuver won the COLIN 2022 challenge on predicting the validity and novelty of arguments stated in natural language as part of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining. Their work is reported here.
Best paper at COLING 2022 workshop
Selene Baez, Piek Vossen and their colleague Thomas Baier won the best paper award at the 1st Workshop on Customized Chat Grounding Persona and Knowledge for their paper Evaluating Agent Interactions Through Episodic Knowledge Graphs
HHAI 2022 proceedings available
The proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI 2022) are now available under open access. Download them here.
PhD defense of Mike Ligthart
“A sense of connection is essential when deploying robots for children”.
Mike Lighthart defends his PhD thesis on 30 September. See here for an explanation of his work (in Dutch)
AI learns when to leave a decision to an expert
Part of being smart is knowing where your limitations lie. Learning AI systems have long been bad at this. But thanks to UvA researchers Rajeev Verma and Eric Nalisnick, AI systems are now starting to learn when it would be better to leave a decision to a human expert. See here for a brief explanation.
Catholijn Jonker keynote speaker at IC3K 2022
Catholijn Jonker is keynote speaker at the combined IC3K conferences in Malta, on the topic “Self-Reflective Hybrid Intelligence: Combining Human with Artificial Intelligence and Logic“
HHAI 2022 Conference
Here is a video impression of our very successful First International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence.
250 participants, 5 days, 7 workshops, 45 main conference papers
NIAS Fellowship for Davide Grossi
Davide has been selected for a 5 months fellowship at NIAS, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Science of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science, studying how to develop digital democracy algorithms that we can trust to be truly democratic.
Best Paper at AAMAS 2022
Davide Grossi won a best paper award at the AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems).
The paper called “Social Choice Around the Block: On the Computational Social Choice of Blockchain” charts a research agenda at the interface of multi-agent systems and blockchain research. Davide Grossi won the award in the “Blue Sky Ideas track”, which emphasises visionary ideas, long-term challenges and new research opportunities.
Best Paper at HRI 2022
Mike Ligthart, Koen Hindriks and Mark Neerincx received the Best paper award at HRI 2022, the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2022 for their paper: Memory-Based Personalization for Fostering a Long-Term Child-Robot Relationship. Impressive! https://dl-acm-org.vu-nl.idm.oclc.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3523760.3523775
NWO Grant for Eric Nalisnick
Eric Nalisnick has won a prestigious VENI grant from NWO on “Continual Learning under Human Guidance”.
Winning the NeurIPS IGLU Challenge
Our PhD students Putra Manggala, Kata Naszadi, Michiel van der Meer and Tawewoon Kim won the IGLU contest on ‘ Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment’ at NeurIPS 2021.
Paper of the year award
Our paper “A Research Agenda for Hybrid Intelligence” in IEEE Computer received the paper of the year award!
HHAI 2022
We are organising the 1st International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence, 13-17 June 2022 in Amsterdam. See https://www.hhai-conference.org/ for more information.
