Artificial intelligence is increasingly imposing itself on the reality of contemporary societies, although new technological developments come into being every day, this phenomenon is not correspondingly reflected in the public sphere. Considering that it is important to know and discuss this reality, this cycle of debates takes a look at the current applications of artificial intelligence reflecting upon its social implications in a whole range of different areas (ranging from health to privacy, employability and other areas) and the way in which the future can be imagined within this new paradigm.
Between April and
June, the cycle is divided into three separate moments, each of them a
double programme: a debate with several speakers from the academic and
business worlds and a conference.
INESC ID leads European project on the use of AI for testing advanced interactive software systems as part of the H2020
The project, called iv4XR (Intelligent
Verification/Validation for Extended Reality Based Systems), is led by INESC ID
and will be developed by a European consortium, as part of the H2020 programme.
Project iv4XR will develop
groundbreaking verification and validation technology for Extended
Reality (XR) systems based on techniques from AI to provide learning and
reasoning over a virtual world. With this technology XR developers can deploy
powerful test agents to automatically explore and test the correctness of a
virtual world as they iteratively develop and refine it. This includes testing
user experience using socio-emotional AI. The project results will enable
developers to conduct automated assessment of the quality of user experience,
parameterized by different target groups of users, and different user
experience goals.
Nowadays, Extended Reality (XR) systems (e.g. advanced interactive systems, such as, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)) have emerged in various domains, ranging from entertainment, cultural heritage, to combat training and mission critical applications. The development and authoring of such systems is an iterative process that also includes quality assurance to make sure that the resulting systems are correct and delivering a high quality user experience. As the complexity of these systems keeps increasing, the XR industry now finds itself confronting a soaring engineering challenge: paradoxically, XR’s fine grained and high level of interactivity and realism make such systems very hard and expensive to test. The current XR authoring and development toolset poses no XR testing technology beyond rudimentary record and replay tools that only work for simple test scenarios. The iv4XR project will address this difficult challenge.
This project will be carried out by a team consisting
of four companies (large and SMEs) representing the XR industry, three
universities, and two research institutes. The team combines decades of
expertise in advanced interactive systems, AI, and software engineering.
Consortium includes
9 organizations from eight different nationalities
Besides INESC ID, there are eight other partners, from seven different nationalities (Spanish, Italian, Dutch, English, French, Czech, and Swedish), involved in the project: UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT (The Netherlands), FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER (Italy), JUNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE VALENCIA (Spain), GAMEWARE EUROPE LIMITED (UK), AGI RESEARCH SRO (Czech Republic),THALES SIX GTS FRANCE SAS (France), THALES AVS FRANCE SAS (France) and UMEA UNIVERSITET (Sweden).
INESC ID is represented in this project by the GAIPS –
Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group, which will be responsible
for implementing this project. Rui Prada, as project leader, highlights the
expected growth of the field and market of XR systems in gaming, training and
operational domains. He argues that AI will have an important contribution in
the development of complex XR systems and will be crucial to support the new
emerging uses of XR.
Project iv4XR is scheduled to start in October 2019,
has a duration of 36 months and will be receiving an investment of
approximately 3.7 million euros.
AI for Social Good: Learning and Planning in the End-to-End, Data-to-Deployment Pipeline
Prof. Milind Tambe
University of Southern California
17/04/2019
Room 0.19/0.20, IST – Pavilhão de Informática II, Alameda | 13:30H
Abstract
With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a
tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing
complex societal problems. I will focus on the problems of public safety
and security, wildlife conservation and public health in low-resource
communities, and present research advances in multiagent systems to
address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to strategically deploy our
limited intervention resources in these problem domains. I will discuss
the importance of conducting this research via building the full data
to field deployment end-to-end pipeline rather than just building
machine learning or planning components in isolation. Results from our
deployments from around the world show concrete improvements over the
state of the art. In pushing this research agenda, we believe AI can
indeed play an important role in fighting social injustice and improving
society.
Bio
Milind Tambe is Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering
at the University of Southern California(USC) and the Founding
Co-Director of CAIS, the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in
Society, where his research focuses on advancing AI and multiagent
systems research for Social Good. He is recipient of the IJCAI
(International Joint Conference on AI) John McCarthy Award, ACM/SIGAI
Autonomous Agents Research Award from AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and
Multiagent Systems Conference), AAAI (Association for Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence) Robert S Engelmore Memorial Lecture award,
INFORMS Wagner prize, the Rist Prize of the Military Operations Research
Society, the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland
security award, International Foundation for Agents and Multiagent
Systems influential paper award; he is a fellow of AAAI and ACM. He has
also received meritorious Commendation from the US Coast Guard and LA
Airport Police, and Certificate of Appreciation from US Federal Air
Marshals Service for pioneering real-world deployments of security
games. Prof. Tambe has also co-founded a company based on his research,
Avata Intelligence , where he serves as the director of research. Prof.
Tambe received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie
Mellon University.
Venue:
1.30PM Room 0.19/0.20, IST – Pavilhão de Informática II, Alameda
Anfiteatro VA4 no piso-1 do Edificio de Civil – IST/Alameda | 11:00H
Abstract
Software has bugs. What can we do to find as many of these as
possible? In this talk, I show how to systematically test software by
generating such tests automatically, starting with simple random
“fuzzing” generators and then proceeding to more effective grammar-based
and coverage-guided approaches. Being fully automatic and easy to
deploy, such fuzzers run at little cost, yet are very effective in
finding bugs: Our own Langfuzz grammar-based test generator for
JavaScript runs around the clock for the Firefox, Chrome, and Edge web
browsers and so far has found more than 2,600 confirmed bugs. Our
latest test generator prototypes are even able to automatically learn
the input language of a given program, which allows to generate highly
effective tests for arbitrary programs without any particular setup. In
the past months, we have collected our tools and techniques in an
interactive textbook (www.fuzzingbook.org) with 10,000 well-documented
lines of Python code for highly productive fuzzing.
Bio
Andreas Zeller is Faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for
Information Security, and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland
University, both in Saarbrücken, Germany. In 2010, Zeller was inducted
as Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to automated debugging and
mining software archives, for which he also obtained the ACM SIGSOFT
Outstanding Research Award in 2018. His current work focuses on
specification mining and test case generation, funded by grants from DFG
and the European Research Council (ERC).
Lisbon Academy of Sciences promoted another “Tardes na Academia“, on March 26th, at 5pm.
On this IV Session, INESC-ID Researcher Francisco C. Santos invites Ana Paiva, also researcher at INESC-ID, for an afternoon on: “Artificial Intelligence, Cooperation and Social Robotics”.
This initiative aims to engage distinct generations of scientists and researchers, in the various fields of science and knowledge represented in the SJC (Seminário de Jovens Cientistas).
The SJC is integrated in the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and seeks to maintain the link between the Academy and the younger members of the scientific community, as is happening in other European countries. The trans-disciplinary nature of the JCC allows to address the most relevant issues for society, producing tools that can be used by science policy makers and promoting the sharing of knowledge and knowledge with society in general.
The Workshop “Computational Intelligence: some recent advances and applications” took place on March 25th, from 9am to 5pm, at Abreu Faro Amphitheatre.
Arquivo.pt is a research infrastructure managed by the Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P. (FCT, IP) through its FCCN unit, which allows searching and accessing web pages since 1996. The main objective is the preservation of information published on the web for memory, study and research purposes.
Arquivo.pt 2019 contest aims to reward original and innovative works that demonstrate the usefulness of the Arquivo.pt service, the importance of preserving and using the information published on the web. Entries may deal with any subject, provided that Arquivo.pt is used as the main source of information, practical applications or complete research studies based on information preserved from the web by Arquivo.pt. The applications must clearly demonstrate the usefulness and unique nature of Arquivo.pt for the proposed work and the impact of the work on the society or community for which it is intended. The competition is open until May 3rd at 1PM, to all interested parties, individually or in groups, although its main recipients are members of the educational and scientific community.
Information about this competition can be obtained from:
João Miranda Lemos, coordenador do grupo de investigação “Control of Dynamical Systems” (CSD) no INESC-ID, editou um novo livro do IST PRESS, intitulado, “Controlo no Espaço de Estados”.
Este livro foi escrito para suportar um segundo curso de Controlo baseado no modelo de estado, mas com um pouquinho de criatividade podemos incluir ( da maneira mais séria) muitos exemplos algo inesperados. O livro está organizado em quatro partes, que correspondem a grandes temas da engenharia dos sistemas de controlo:
• Modelo de estado de sistemas lineares; • Controlo por realimentação linear de variáveis de estado • Controlo de sistemas não lineares • Controlo ótimo.
The second training event of the TAPAS Consortium will take place in Lisbon from 11-14 February.
This training event will cover four topics related to speech processing and machine learning. Each day will have a morning session with relevant lectures on the topic, followed by an afternoon exercise assignment where ESRs will get hands-on experience with the topic of the day.
Candidaturas abertas no âmbito do Sistema de Apoio à Transformação Digital da Administração Pública
“INTELIGÊNCIA ARTIFICIAL E CIÊNCIA DOS DADOS”
São elegíveis acções de promoção e divulgação de iniciativas com vista à disseminação de melhores práticas e partilha de conhecimento de novas formas de organização interna e de prestação de serviços públicos aos cidadãos e às empresas, bem como o desenvolvimento de novos modelos de inovação e de experimentação na Administração Pública, como sejam laboratórios de inovação, plataformas de incubação e aceleradores, projetos colaborativos de cocriação de soluções inovadoras, projetos de governação integrada, em particular os que visam a cooperação internacional e respostas a desafios societais.
Entidades beneficiárias:
a) As entidades da administração central do Estado;
b) As entidades públicas empresariais prestadoras de serviços públicos;
c) Outros níveis da administração ou outras entidades públicas e privadas, no âmbito das suas atividades sem fins lucrativos, ao abrigo de protocolos celebrados com a administração central.
