Dirk Helbing
ETH Zurich, Swiss (Switzerland)
"From Agent-Based Simulations to Artificial Societies: Past and Future"
My talk will be focused on agent-based models I have been working on - from pedestrian crowds to traffic flows, from logistical systems to opinion formation, and more. When presenting these examples, I will underline the importance of complexity science to understand the collective behavior emerging in many multi-agent systems. I will show how slight changes in the interactions of system components can produce desirable outcomes „like magic”, based on self-organization. I will also show how the network structure can dramatically change the resulting collective behavior, even when the interactions of the system components stay the same. Last but not least I will comment on using Machine Learning approaches to model complex dynamical system and applying generative AI. Despite the tremendous potentials, these do still have a number of important issues that should always be kept in mind.
Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich and affiliate of its Computer Science Department. Furthermore, he is member of the external faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.
In January 2014, Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Shortly later, he was also affiliate professor at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft for some years, where he led the PhD school in “Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future”.
Dirk Helbing started as a physicist. With his diploma thesis, he initiated the area of pedestrian, crowd, and evacuation modeling and simulation. During his PhD and habilitation in physics, he helped to establish the fields of socio-, econo- and traffic physics. He was also co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DPG).
The work of Prof. Helbing is documented by hundreds of media reports and publications, among them more than 10 papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS), the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP), and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative (external page www.futurict.eu), he helped to establish data science and computational social science in Europe, as well as global systems science.
Pascale Fung
Senior Director of AI Research, Meta-FAIR, Chair Professor of ECE, HKUST. Fellow of AAAI, ACL, IEEE, ISCA. (Hong Kong)
"Embodied AI Agents"
Embodied AI agents are AI systems that are embodied in some visual, virtual or physical form. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are designed to perceive and act within their surroundings, offering a more human-like interaction. We propose that the development of world models, both physical and mental, is central to reasoning and planning of embodied AI agents, allowing these agents to understand and predict their environment, to understand user intentions and social contexts, thereby enhancing their ability to perform complex tasks autonomously. Future research directions include improving the autonomy and adaptability of these agents, enhancing their social intelligence, and ensuring ethical standards are met. By addressing these challenges, embodied AI agents hold the promise of transforming human-technology interaction, making it more intuitive and responsive to human needs.
Pascale Fung is a Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her "significant contributions to the field of conversational AI and to the development of ethical AI principles and algorithms", an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is an Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research centre promoting human-centric AI. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. She was a Distinguished Consultant on Responsible AI at Meta in 2022, and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google in 2023. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.
Prof. Fung was born in Shanghai to professional artist parents but found her calling in artificial intelligence when she became interested in science fiction as a child. Today, her research interest lies in building frontier AI models that benefit humans and society and in understanding the emerging capabilities and limitations of such models in order to render them more controllable and trustworthy. She was a past Editor and Associate Editor for Computer Speech and Language, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Transactions for ACL, IEEE Signal Processing Letters. She served as a Committee Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technology Committee (SLTC) for six years. She is a past president t and a Board Member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistics Data and Corpus Based Approaches in NLP (SIGDAT).
Prof. Fung received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1997. She worked and studied at AT&T Bell Labs, BBN Systems & Technologies, LIMSI, CNRS, France,Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Japan, and at Ecole Centrale Paris, France. She speaks seven European and Asian languages.
Marcus Specht
Professor Learning Sciences in Higher Education CATALPA – Fernuniversität in Hagen | Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
"AI in Education, design perspectives and research questions"
AI in education is not a new research and application domain for AI. Intelligent Tutoring System have been around and used in education since more than 30 years. Recently new opportunities and challenges become more and more obvious with generative AI systems which include assessment, feedback systems, but also over-reliance and cognitive outsourcing.
The talk will take a perspective of Technology Enhanced Learning and try to analyze the unique affordances that new AI systems can offer the education system and the individual learners and teachers. This aims at framing AI as a learning technology and its potential enhancements for human learning as also how to baseline and measure its effects in the process.
The talk will present current approaches to using genAI system in online assessment, formative feedback, and personalized tutoring. Furthermore the talk with take a perspective of learners, teachers, and researchers and their use of genAI systems in educational settings.
Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht is Professor of Learning Sciences in Higher Education at the Research Center for Higher Education of the Future (CATALPA) at the Fernuniversität in Hagen. He is also Professor for Digital Education at the Technical University of Delft. He received his Diploma in Psychology in 1995 and a Dissertation from the University of Trier in 1998 on adaptive information technology. From 2001 he headed the department “Mobile Knowledge” at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT). From 2005 to 2018 he was Professor for Learning Technologies at the Open Universiteit Nederland and head of the Learning Innovation Lab. From 2018-2024 he led the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Education and Learning, and from 2021 to 2024 he was the TU Delft lead for the 4TU Center for Engineering Education. His research focus is on Computational Thinking, Learning Analytics, AI in Education, and Virtual and Augmented Reality for Education. Prof. Specht is an Apple Distinguished Educator and was President (2013-2015) of the International Association of Mobile Learning. He currently is president of the European Association for Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL). He is Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.