[PLing] Gastvortrag von Katrien Beuls zum Thema human-like communication in autonomous agents

[Stephanie Gross]

Liebe Kolleg*innen,

ich möchte Sie sehr herzlich zum Gastvortrag von Katrien Beuls 
(Université de Namur) einladen. In ihrem Vortrag beschäftigt sie sich 
mit dem Thema, dass aktuelle kommunikative Systeme, die von künstlichen 
Agenten verwendet werden, den Fähigkeiten menschlicher Kommunikation im 
Bezug auf Ausdrucksstärke, Flexibilität und Adaptivität weit hinterher 
hinken. Der Vortrag trägt den Titel "Unravelling the Computational 
Mechanisms Underlying the Emergence of Human-like Communication Systems 
in Populations of Autonomous Agents" und findet am Mittwoch, den 27.7., 
um 18:30 statt. Er ist Teil der aktuell laufenden Vortragsreihe des 
Österreichischen Forschungsinstituts für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI).

Der Vortrag wird dieses Mal in hybrider Form abgehalten, d.h. die 
Teilnahme ist auch vor Ort am OFAI möglich (Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna). 
Bitte beachten Sie, dass vor Ort für alle Teilnehmer*innen Maskenpflicht 
besteht. Alternativ ist die Teilnahme auch über Zoom möglich:

URL: 
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868

Abstract und Biographie finden Sie unten angehängt.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Teilnahme!

Mit besten Grüßen,
Stephanie Gross


_Abstract_: Over the last two decades, important advances in the field 
of artificial intelligence have led to tremendous progress in many tasks 
and application domains, including computer vision, robotics and natural 
language processing. Yet, the communication systems that are used by 
artificial agents for human-agent and agent-agent communication today 
are still far removed from exhibiting the expressiveness, flexibility 
and adaptivity that is found in human languages. This gap may mostly be 
ascribed to the fact that current communication systems are learned by 
extracting frequently occurring patterns from huge amounts of annotated 
data, limiting their applicability to predefined tasks set in stable 
environments. In this talk, I will present my long-term research 
programme which takes a radically different approach with the goal of 
building truly intelligent systems that are capable of adapting to 
unforeseeable changes in their tasks and environment. Rather than 
extracting patterns from annotated data, we equip populations of 
autonomous agents with computational mechanisms that allow them to 
self-organise an emergent conceptual and linguistic system through 
communicative interactions. By means of multi-agent experiments, we 
investigate the mechanisms that are needed for inventing, adopting and 
aligning transparent languages based on novel compositions of atomic 
cognitive capabilities that are mastered by the agents. These 
methodological innovations have the potential to lead to a paradigm 
shift in the way in which explainable human-agent and agent-agent 
communication is modelled, both in emergent communication experiments 
and real-world applications. Such applications include safety assistants 
(communicating with humans), self-driving vehicles (communicating with 
each other) and distributed smart devices in a home environment 
(communicating with humans and each other).

_Biography_: Katrien Beuls received her MSc in Speech and Language 
Processing from the University of Edinburgh in 2009 and her MA in 
Linguistics from the University of Leuven in 2008. She defended her PhD 
in Computer Science in 2013 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on a new 
framework for computer-assisted language learning that combines the 
language game methodology and computational construction grammar. Since 
April 2022, she is assistant professor in computer science at the 
University of Namur. She has been involved as PI and co-PI in numerous 
European research projects, including the H2020 MUHAI project, the H2020 
ODYCCEUS project, the AI4EU platform and the Marie Curie initial 
training network ESSENCE. Her main research interests lie in the 
applications of evolutionary and hybrid AI in diverse tasks that require 
advanced perception, reasoning and learning skills.

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Mag. Dr. Stephanie Gross MSc     | Austrian Research Institute for
email:stephanie.gross at ofai.at    | Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
phone: (+43-1)5324621-1          | Freyung 6/3/1a
                                  | A-1010 Vienna, Austria
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