OFAI is delighted to announce its 2024 Spring Lecture Series, featuring an eclectic lineup of internal and external speakers.
The talks are intended to familiarize attendees with the latest research developments in AI and related fields, and to forge new connections with those working in other areas. The main theme of the current series is large language models.
Lectures will take place at 18:30 Vienna time, usually every other Wednesday. All lectures will be held online via Zoom; in-person attendance at OFAI is also possible for certain lectures. Attendance is open to the public and free of charge. No registration is required.
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24 April 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)
Jordan Kodner (Stony Brook University)
Is it Language or Task Design? Reinterpreting language models' recent successes in morphology and syntax learning
The success of neural language models (LMs) on a wide range of language-related tasks may be in part due to their ability to induce human-like representations or understanding of natural language grammars. Humans are, after all, gold-standard language learners. For the past several years, researchers pursuing this question have developed a number of methodologies for testing the grammar representations learned by LMs that have reached generally positive conclusions. I will take a critical look at such studies in this talk. While modern LMs are clearly extremely impressive, and clearly do often capture important aspects of natural language grammars, the methodologies of many popular studies have unfairly overestimated the capacities of LMs when it comes to their ability to induce human-like representations. Focusing on questions of hierarchical syntactic representations and generalization in inflectional morphology, I will discuss how unintended biases in data-splitting, artificial training or test data, overly simplistic evaluations, weak or absent baselines, and faulty interpretations, have conspired to overestimate the abilities of LMs. While the conclusions of this study are largely negative in terms of the current state-of-affairs, they are also optimistic. By employing more thorough and rigorous methodologies, we have developed a better scientific understanding of the nature of LMs and representations of the grammar. In identifying weak points for current models, we points towards research areas where greater improvements may be gained.
29 May 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)
Jim Young, BSc, PhD (University of Manitoba)
Designing Human–Robot Interaction
How should we interact with a robot? How can we give it commands? Get information from it? Robots' real world, often collocated and autonomous presence, provides a range of new and exciting opportunities for re-envisioning interaction with technology. In this talk, Dr. Young will present his team's work on exploring novel interaction with robots through a range of projects over the last 12 years. A key focus of this work is aiming to solve HRI problems through novel interaction design rather than technological advances, re-conceptualizing problems to make them simpler. Further, Dr. Young's team explores the limits of robots' abilities to use emotion and human social interaction techniques, for example, to deceive and manipulate people. Finally. Dr. Young will introduce his lab's current projects on re-designing domestic companion robot interactions with a focus on simplicity and deployability.
How to attend: Attend online via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.
You can add this event to your calendar.
05 June 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)
Dr. Margherita Pallottino (University of Geneva / OFAI)
TBA
Abstract TBA
How to attend: Attend online via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.
19 June 2024 at 18:30 CEST (UTC+2)
em. O. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hubert Haider (Universiät Salzburg)
TBA
Abstract TBA
How to attend: Attend online via Zoom (meeting ID: 842 8244 2460; passcode: 678868), or dial in by phone.