Symbols as a Lingua Franca for Bridging Human-AI Chasm For Explainable and Advisable AI Systems
Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati from Arizona State University spoke on "Symbols as a Lingua Franca for Bridging Human-AI Chasm For Explainable and Advisable AI Systems" on Thursday, 15th September, at 5 p.m. in Aryabhatta Hall (CSB25), IIT Madras. Abstract: Despite the surprising power of many modern AI systems that often learn their own representations, there is significant discontent about their inscrutability and the attendant problems in their ability to interact with humans. While alternatives such as neuro-symbolic approaches have been proposed, there is a lack of consensus on what they are about. There are often two independent motivations (i) symbols as a lingua franca for human-AI interaction and (ii) symbols as system-produced abstractions used by the AI system in its internal reasoning. The jury is still out on whether AI systems will need to use symbols in their internal reasoning to achieve general intelligence capabilities. Whatever the answer there is, the need for (human-understandable) symbols in human-AI interaction seems quite compelling. In particular, humans would be interested in providing explicit (symbolic) knowledge and advice -- and expect machine explanations in kind. This alone requires AI systems to maintain a symbolic interface for interaction with humans. In this talk, Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati will motivate this point of view, and describe recent efforts in our research group along this direction. Speaker Bio: Subbarao Kambhampati is a professor in the School of Computing & AI at Arizona State University, Tempe. Kambhampati teaches and conducts research in Artificial Intelligence. His research group studies fundamental problems in planning and decision making, motivated in particular by the challenges of human-aware AI systems. Kambhampati is an elected fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing machinery. He is also an award-winning teacher and the recipient of the university-wide last lecture award. Kambhampati served as the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, was a trustee of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and is the chair of AAAS Section T (Information, Communication and Computation). He was also a founding board member of the Partnership on AI. Kambhampati is active in fostering public understanding of AI technology and its societal impacts. He has served on high-profile advisory panels for American, Canadian and Indian governments, and is frequently quoted in prominent national and international media including The New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Speaker's Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/rao2z
Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati from Arizona State University spoke on "Symbols as a Lingua Franca for Bridging Human-AI Chasm For Explainable and Advisable AI Systems" on Thursday, 15th September, at 5 p.m. in Aryabhatta Hall (CSB25), IIT Madras. Abstract: Despite the surprising power of many modern AI systems that often learn their own representations, there is significant discontent about their inscrutability and the attendant problems in their ability to interact with humans. While alternatives such as neuro-symbolic approaches have been proposed, there is a lack of consensus on what they are about. There are often two independent motivations (i) symbols as a lingua franca for human-AI interaction and (ii) symbols as system-produced abstractions used by the AI system in its internal reasoning. The jury is still out on whether AI systems will need to use symbols in their internal reasoning to achieve general intelligence capabilities. Whatever the answer there is, the need for (human-understandable) symbols in human-AI interaction seems quite compelling. In particular, humans would be interested in providing explicit (symbolic) knowledge and advice -- and expect machine explanations in kind. This alone requires AI systems to maintain a symbolic interface for interaction with humans. In this talk, Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati will motivate this point of view, and describe recent efforts in our research group along this direction. Speaker Bio: Subbarao Kambhampati is a professor in the School of Computing & AI at Arizona State University, Tempe. Kambhampati teaches and conducts research in Artificial Intelligence. His research group studies fundamental problems in planning and decision making, motivated in particular by the challenges of human-aware AI systems. Kambhampati is an elected fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing machinery. He is also an award-winning teacher and the recipient of the university-wide last lecture award. Kambhampati served as the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, was a trustee of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and is the chair of AAAS Section T (Information, Communication and Computation). He was also a founding board member of the Partnership on AI. Kambhampati is active in fostering public understanding of AI technology and its societal impacts. He has served on high-profile advisory panels for American, Canadian and Indian governments, and is frequently quoted in prominent national and international media including The New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Speaker's Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/rao2z