The AI Seminar is a weekly meeting at the University of Alberta where researchers interested in artificial intelligence (AI) can share their research. Presenters include both local speakers from the University of Alberta and visitors from other institutions. Topics can be related in any way to artificial intelligence, from foundational theoretical work to innovative applications of AI techniques to new fields and problems.

Abstract:

The scientific field of artificial intelligence (AI) has never had a stronger public presence, which can be both positive and negative. Rather than get caught up in the naive controversies about the spectrum of good and bad potential consequences of Ai, we focus on some foundational scientific challenges which seem to get ignored. We claim one such challenge is the largest "elephant in the room," and raises a fundamental question about debugging so-called "foundation models." What constitutes a foundation model is increasingly complicated by an emerging spectrum of neurosymbolic foundation models which seem to span a broad scope of representations from deep neural networks, reinforcement learning policies, Bayesian probability, and a collection of logical, non-monotonic, and belief revision representation models. We explore how several of these foundation representation systems might participate in a more general AI foundation framework, by considering the role of explainability (XAI) and debuggability. An immediate observation is that a coordinated "stack" of foundation models may provide the basis for a new era of AI.

Presenter Bio:

Dr. Randy Goebel is a Fellow and Member of the Board of Directors at Amii and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta where he also held the position of Associate Vice President (Academic). He was one of four original founding researchers of Amii and currently is a Fellow and sits on the Board of Directors. He is also the interim Executive Director of the NRC/UAlberta Nanotechnology initiative, a member of the scientific advisory board of DFKI (the German Institute for AI), the China Institute at the University of Alberta, and sits on the National Program Committee of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. He is also a scientific advisor to ROSS Intelligence (Toronto, CA), Intellicon (Seoul, KR), and AI Fred (Montréal, CA). Over his career, Randy has supervised more than 85 early-stage researchers at the MSc, PhD and Post-doctoral Fellow levels, and he has published more than 200 publications including refereed and invited papers and publications in books. He is a highly-regarded speaker, having delivered talks at academic conferences and institutions as well as businesses and governmental organizations around the world.