Abstract

Ever since ChatGPT was launched last November, it has captured the public's imagination quickly leading to upheaval and excitement in all communities, whether business, research or government. But how is it changing the AI research community from where the technology came about? In this talk, I will take a practical perspective on the potential and challenges of working with Large Language Model (LLM)-based technologies. We are using it for core AI tasks of generating plans and knowledge graphs, and exploring its use for decision support in finance, water and elections. The TL;DR is that LLMs can be quite useful but unreliable, and this opens up exciting research opportunities for trusted AI.

Bio

Biplav Srivastava is a Professor of Computer Science at the AI Institute and Department of Computer Science at the University of South Carolina which he joined in 2020 after two decades in industrial research. He directs the 'AI for Society' group which is investigating how to enable people to make rational decisions despite the real world complexities of poor data, changing  goals and limited resources by augmenting their cognitive limitations with technology. His work in Artificial Intelligence spans the sub-fields of reasoning (planning, scheduling), knowledge extraction and representation (ontology, open data), learning (classification, deep, adversarial) and interaction (collaborative assistants), and extends to their application for Services (process automation, composition) and Sustainability (water, traffic, health, governance). In particular, he has been involved with building innovative systems for decision support in domains as diverse as governance (IJCAI 2016), astronomy (AAAI 2018 best demo award), water (AAAI 2018), smart room (ICAPS 2018 demo runner up, IJCAI 2018), career planning (commercial product), market intelligence (AAAI 2020 deployed AI award), dialogs for information retrieval (ICAPS 2021), fairness assessment (AAAI 2021),  computer games (AAAI 2022), generalized planning (IJCAI 2023), transportation, set recommendation (teaming, meals) and health. Biplav’s works have led to many science firsts and high-impact commercial innovations valued over billions of dollars, 200+ papers and 70 US patents issued, and awards for papers, demos and hacks. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, AAAI Senior Member, IEEE Senior Member and AAAS Leshner Fellow for Public Engagement on AI (2020-2021). More details about him are at:

https://sites.google.com/site/biplavsrivastava/