Fellow of ACM
Distinguished Scientist & Research Lead
Google DeepMind
Date: Wednesday, May 8th, 2024
Topic:
The LLM (Large Language Model) Revolution: Implications from Chatbots and Tool-use to Reasoning
Abstract:
Deep learning is a shock to our field in many ways, yet still many of us were surprised at the incredible performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLM uses new deep learning techniques with massively large data sets to understand, predict, summarize, and generate new content. LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini/Bard have seen a dramatic increase in their capabilities—generating text that is nearly indistinguishable from human-written text, translating languages with amazing accuracy, and answering your questions in an informative way. This has led to a number of exciting research directions for chatbots, tool-use, and reasoning:
– Chatbots: LLM chatbots that are more engaging and informative than traditional chatbots. First, LLMs can understand the context of a conversation better than ever before, allowing them to provide more relevant and helpful responses. Second, LLMs enable more engaging conversations than traditional chatbots, because they can understand the nuances of human language and respond in a more natural way. For example, LLMs can make jokes, ask questions, and provide feedback. Finally, because LLM chatbots can hold conversations on a wide range of topics, they can eventually learn and adapt to the user’s individual preferences.
– Tool-use, Retrieval Augmentation and Multi-modality: LLMs are also being used to create tools that help us with everyday tasks. For example, LLMs can be used to generate code, write emails, and even create presentations. Beyond human-like responses in Chatbots, later LLM innovators realized LLM’s ability to incorporate tool-use, including calling search and recommendation engines, which means that they could effectively become human assistants in synthesizing summaries from web search and recommendation results. Tool-use integration have also enabled multimodal capabilities, which means that the chatbot can produce text, speech, images, and video.
– Reasoning: LLMs are also being used to develop new AI systems that can reason and solve problems. Using Chain-of-Thought approaches, we have shown LLM’s ability to break down problems, and then use logical reasoning to solve each of these smaller problems, and then combine the solutions to reach the final answer. LLMs can answer common-sense questions by using their knowledge of the world to reason about the problem, and then use their language skills to generate text that is both creative and informative.
In this talk, I will cover recent advances in these 3 major areas, attempting to draw connections between them, and paint a picture of where major advances might still come from. While the LLM revolution is still in its early stages, it has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with AI, and make a significant impact on our lives.
Biography:
Ed H. Chi is a Distinguished Scientist at Google DeepMind, leading machine learning research teams working on large language models (LaMDA/Bard), neural recommendations, and reliable machine learning. With 39 patents and ~200 research articles, he is also known for research on user behavior in web and social media. As the Research Platform Lead, he helped launched Bard, a conversational AI experiment, and delivered significant improvements for YouTube, News, Ads, Google Play Store at Google with >660 product improvements since 2013.
Prior to Google, he was Area Manager and Principal Scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s Augmented Social Cognition Group in researching how social computing systems help groups of people to remember, think and reason. Ed earned his 3 degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota. Inducted as an ACM Fellow and into the CHI Academy, he also received a 20-year Test of Time award for research in information visualization. He has been featured and quoted in the press, including the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated Press.
Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM
Regents Professor and William Norris Endowed Chair
University of Minnesota, USA
Date: Thursday, May 9th, 2024
Topic:
Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning: A New Framework for Accelerating Scientific Discovery and Addressing Global Environmental Challenges
Abstract:
Climate change, loss of bio-diversity, food/water/energy security for the growing population of the world are some of the greatest environmental challenges that are facing the humanity. These challenges have been traditionally studied by science and engineering communities via process-guided models that are grounded in scientific theories. Motivated by phenomenal success of Machine Learning (ML) in advancing areas such as computer vision and language modeling, there is a growing excitement in the scientific communities to harness the power of machine learning to address these societal challenges. In particular, massive amount of data about Earth and its environment is now continuously being generated by a large number of Earth observing satellites, in-situ sensors as well as physics-based models. These information-rich datasets in conjunction with recent ML advances offer huge potential for understanding how the Earth’s climate and ecosystem have been changing, how they are being impacted by humans actions, and for devising policies to manage them in a sustainable fashion. However, capturing this potential is contingent on a paradigm shift in data-intensive scientific discovery since the “black box” ML models often fail to generalize to scenarios not seen in the data used for training and produce results that are not consistent with scientific understanding of the phenomena.
This talk presents an overview of a new generation of machine learning algorithms, where scientific know-ledge is deeply integrated in the design and training of machine learning models to accelerate scientific discovery. These knowledge-guided machine learning (KGML) techniques are fundamentally more powerful than standard machine learning approaches, and are particularly relevant for scientific and engineering problems that are traditionally addressed via process-guided (also called mechanistic or first principle-based) models, but whose solutions are hampered by incomplete or inaccurate knowledge of physics or underlying processes. While this talk will illustrate the potential of the KGML paradigm in the context of environmental problems (e.g., Ecology, Hydrology, Agronomy, climate science), the paradigm has the potential to greatly advance the pace of discovery in any discipline where mechanistic models are used.
Biography:
Vipin Kumar is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the William Norris Endowed Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Kumar received the B.E. degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (formerly, University of Roorkee), India, in 1977, the M.E. degree in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute, Eindhoven, Netherlands, in 1979, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park, in 1982. He also served as the Head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department from 2005 to 2015 and the Director of Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) from 1998 to 2005.
Kumar has served as chair/co-chair for many international conferences in the area of data mining, big data, and high performance computing, including 25th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2019), 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (2002), and International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (2001). Kumar co-founded SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and served as a founding co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (an official journal of the American Statistical Association). Currently, Kumar serves on the steering committees of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, and is series editor for the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Book Series published by CRC Press/Chapman Hall.
Kumar has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement for Science (AAAS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee (2013), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park (2009), and IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award (2005). Kumar’s foundational research in data mining and high performance computing has been honored by the ACM SIGKDD 2012 Innovation Award, which is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, one of IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards in high-performance computing, and Test-of-time award from 2021 Supercomputing conference (SC21).
Fellow of ACM, AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE
Regents Professor / Ira A. Fulton Professor
Arizona State University, USA
Date: Friday, May 10th, 2024
Topic: Novel Challenges in Social Media Mining – Embracing LLMs
Abstract:
Social media data differs from conventional data in many ways. It is big, noisy, linked, multimodal, and user generated. Through the lens of social media, unprecedented opportunities emerge for researchers in AI and data mining. Large Language Models (LLMs) add new challenges. In this talk, we use examples to illustrate (1) fundamental problems associated with social media, challenging common practice and existential understanding in machine learning and data mining, (2) intriguing questions, unique to social media, that can be answered by mining social data, and (3) how we can make a difference – that is, contributing to society at large – by developing AI algorithms on social media mining embracing LLMs. Seeking interdisciplinary collaborations, we contemplate the promising future of social media mining in the rapid development of AI.
Biography:
Dr. Huan Liu is a Regents Professor and Ira A. Fulton professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. He is the recipient of the ACM SIGKDD 2022 Innovation Award for his outstanding contributions to the foundation, principles, and applications of social media mining and feature selection for data Mining. He co-authored the textbook, Social Media Mining: An Introduction, by Cambridge University Press. He is Editor in Chief of ACM TIST, Founding Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Big Data, its Specialty Chief Editor of Data Mining and Management, and a founding organizer of the International Conference Series on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction. He is a Fellow of ACM, AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE.
