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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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CS Colloquium: Filip Ilievski (USC ISI) - Open-world AI Agents with Common Sense
Tue, Jan 11, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Filip Ilievski, USC
Talk Title: Open-world AI Agents with Common Sense
Abstract: In this talk, I will present my research on building natural-language AI agents that use common sense to act robustly in everyday situations. State-of-the-art technology is inadequate for this purpose: background knowledge and rules provide explainability but they cannot generalize to unseen situations, whereas neural models with natural generalizability are prone to making silly mistakes and are unable to explain their decisions. I will describe our agents which combine the best of both worlds to perform well on open-world tasks without the need for task-specific training data, by 1) organizing commonsense knowledge into a single harmonized resource; 2) enriching commonsense knowledge with axioms and preconditions; and 3) using the enriched knowledge resource to adapt neural models for out-of-domain scenarios that require common sense. The effectiveness of the combined approach is demonstrated through high performance on a range of out-of-domain tasks, including question answering and story generation. I will also reflect on my ongoing research on adapting AI agents to specific domains, enabling them to operate in embodied environments, and combining commonsense with encyclopedic knowledge.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
Join Zoom Meeting
https://usc.zoom.us/j/97448700889
Meeting ID: 974 4870 0889
Biography: Dr. Filip Ilievski is a Research Scientist in the Center on Knowledge Graphs within the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Filip holds a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher before joining ISI. His research focuses on the role of commonsense and encyclopedic knowledge in filling gaps in human communication. Over the past three years, he mentored around twenty Master's and Ph.D. students, and collaborated with researchers at USC, CMU, Bosch Research, RPI, and the University of Lyon. Dr. Ilievski has over 40 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier venues on commonsense reasoning, information extraction, and knowledge graphs. Dr. Ilievski has also been actively organizing workshops (AAAI'21), tutorials (AAAI'21, ISWC'20, ISWC'21, TheWebConf'22), symposiums (USC), and a special journal issue (Semantic Web Journal) on these topics.
Host: Gale Lucas
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cherie Carter
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CS Distinguished Lecture: Jean-Baptiste Mouret (Inria) - Quality Diversity Optimization, from robotics to automated design
Tue, Jan 25, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Inria
Talk Title: Quality Diversity Optimization, from robotics to automated design
Series: Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series
Abstract: Diversity algorithms are a new class of optimization algorithms that aim finding a set of high-performing solutions that all behave differently. They are more and more useful in many fields, from automated design, so that designers can use their own expertise to choose the final design, to robotics, so that a robot can quickly and autonomously adapt to unexpected situations. In this talk, I will first introduce MAP-Elites, which is one of the firsts and most popular Quality Diversity algorithms, then I will show a few recent developments, and highlight some of the most promising applications.
Register in advance for this webinar at:
https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gtk43EXaRc6Q_-8qCfsx5A
After registering, attendees will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Jean-Baptiste Mouret is a senior researcher ("directeur de recherche") at Inria, a French research institute dedicated to computer science and mathematics, in which he conducts researches that intertwine evolutionary algorithms, robotics, and machine learning to make robots more adaptive. Before joining Inria, he was an assistant professor ("maître de conférences) at ISIR (Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics), which is part of Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC, now Sorbonne Université). He obtained a M.S. in computer science from EPITA in 2004, a M.S. in artificial intelligence from the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris, France) in 2005, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the same university in 2008. He was the principal investigator of an ERC grant (ResiBots - Robots with animal-like resilience, 2015-2020), which is the most prestigious grant in Europe, and the recipient of a French "ANR young researcher grant (Creadapt - Creative adaptation by Evolution, 2012-2015). His work was featured on the cover of Nature (Cully et al., 2015) and it received the "2017 ISAL Award for Distinguished Young Investigator in the field of Artificial Life, the "Outstanding Paper of 2015 award from the Society for Artificial Life (2016), the French "La Recherche" award (2016), 3 GECCO best paper awards (2011, GDS track; 2017 & 2018, CS track), and the IEEE CEC "best student paper" award (2009).
Host: Stefanos Nikolaidis
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gtk43EXaRc6Q_-8qCfsx5ALocation: Online - Zoom Webinar
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gtk43EXaRc6Q_-8qCfsx5A
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
