AI4Society Dialogues – Détails, épisodes et analyse

AI4Society Dialogues is a new podcast that takes you behind the scenes to meet some of the talented researchers who are constructing and using AI in ways that will shape our world. This trailer provides a quick overview of our first three episodes. Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer kicks off the series by taking us back to the early days of the University of Alberta computer science department, Dr. Michael Bowling shares how he has applied his love of AI and passion for games in his world class research into poker and Dr. Cathy Adams takes us into the realm of education and how technologies, including AI, are fundamentally reshaping what we teach and how we learn.

Some artists work with clay, or paint, but Dr. Marilène Oliver works with a digitized version of the human body. Her work explores the zeros and ones that we become when WE are rendered into data. Dr. Marilène Oliver is Assistant Professor of Visual Art at the University of Alberta. Her work is at the crossroads of new digital technologies, traditional print, and sculpture – producing objects that bridge the virtual and the real worlds. We talk about her inspiration for using medical scan data as raw material for artistic creation, the personal connections in her work through use of her own data and that of family members, biometric data and the role of our bodies in fuelling AI, her latest project that aims to bring “life” to a body of data to train and AI system, creating an ethics guidance for artistic creators and the tension she feels in seeing the harms of our current AI reality while hoping for a better future. 

Find out more about Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality.

“I’ve just witnessed a really positive way that AI is changing a society (in the Faroe Islands) making it much more affluent…I see the evidence of how AI can be really positive. But in my work, I tend to be very cautious and anxious about AI. I worry that it’s a lot of control and focuses on things that mean we lose our humanity.”  – Marilène Oliver

Dr. Marilène Oliver is an assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada. Dr. Oliver studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, London, UK where she obtained an MPhil with research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’. She has exhibited internationally in both private and public galleries including MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Fundació Sorigué (Spain) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada). Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum and Knoxville Museum of Art. In 2019 Dr. Oliver led and curated the exhibition Dyscorpia: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology and in 2020, the online exhibition Dyscorpia 2.1. She is also the host of LASERAlberta, a public series of art and science events and currently leads the research project ‘Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality’.

Sometimes, the most meaningful advances in technology are about enabling simple things which can have big impacts for a patient’s quality of life. That’s what Dr. Jana Rieger has done. She’s invented a smart-enabled health tech device called Mobili-T that helps patients with something most of us probably take for granted – the ability to swallow. We talk about similarities in the creative process of research and writing a novel, how her research led to starting a company, why she chose to become an entrepreneur, how algorithms and machine learning plays into her work and why she feels “health at home” is the next big thing.

Find out more about True Angle and Mobili-T.

“I like having the open road, the null hypothesis…because you never know what you are going to find….Some of the best ideas come when you’ve left the research [itself] and are doing something else.” – Jana Rieger 

Dr. Jana Rieger is a Professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and Director of Research at the Institute for Reconstructive Sciences in Medicine at the University of Alberta. She’s also the CEO of Edmonton based True Angle Medical Technologies. Dr. Rieger is a global leader in functional outcomes assessment related to head and neck disorders. Over her 20-year career in this field, she has held roles as a professor, clinician, researcher, and most recently, entrepreneur.

How did the University of Alberta become a global leader in AI research? Dr. Jonathan Schaffer shares his personal account of how a community of like minded individuals, early government support and world record setting research set the stage for Alberta to play a leading role in AI research today. We talk about his “ta da” moment in solving the game of checkers with perfect play, why he thinks AI ethics are such an important topic and his latest project – a new book aimed at non-technical audiences.  

“No discipline will be untouched by AI. It’s AI and X…choose your X.” – Jonathan Schaeffer 

Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer is a Distinguished University Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, and the former Dean of Science. His checkers-playing program Chinook was the first computer to win a human world championship (1994), a feat recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records.

How people respond to artificial intelligence depends on their perceptions of whether or not AI is to be trusted, the context in which they encounter AI and, in the case of robots, how the AI looks. Dr. Noah Castelo, a behavioural scientist whose expertise and research into psychology and consumer behaviour are providing deeper insights into the question of how humans will relate to AI. We talk about the uncanny valley of “creepy” human-like robots, how robots are being used in customer service and how perceptions around the future use of AI in the workplace are shaping career choices for students.  

“There are two big attitudes driving perception of (AI) technology…usefulness and comfort and on both we’re not quite there yet…there are major obstacles.” – Noah Castelo

Dr. Noah Castelo is an Assistant Professor in the faculty of business at the University of Alberta. As a behavioral scientist, he studies the human side of AI, focusing on questions that relate to human interactions with AI systems and how growing awareness of AI in general changes how humans treat each other.

The use of artificial intelligence across many high risk domains is raising many ethical  questions. This includes issues around privacy and biases in data as well as questions about equity and inclusion. Dr. Nidhi Hegde is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta whose work is helping to drive new approaches in differential privacy. We talk about the challenges in managing data for privacy, as well as times when we might want to securely share our data. We also dive into the topic of gender and equity with personal insights on being a female AI researcher and how to foster greater participation and inclusion.

“The general public might think it’s a far off, futuristic idea, but in fact it’s all around us…and I think there needs to be a greater data literacy… It’s not Terminator, but it is that search algorithm…there’s this sense of a sort of mystical idea about AI…and I wish that people would understand… it’s a technology and it can be used for many purposes just like any technology. ” – Nidhi Hegde

Dr. Nidhi Hegde is an Associate Professor in the department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. Recently she had been a Research team lead at Borealis AI. Her research interests lie in probabilistic modelling and algorithmic design of machine learning for networks and systems. She has particular interest in privacy and ethics of AI.

Music and sound are fundamental aspects of how we interact with the environment and play an important role in shaping culture. Dr. Michael Frishkopf is an ethnomusicologist who is deploying the power of AI to formulate and test new hypotheses about the relationship between music and culture, speech and individuality. In this wide ranging conversation, we cover the relationship between math and music, the tough challenges of applying machine learning to sound, how the evolution of music technologies impacts culture, and what we can learn from sound in cyberworlds.

“Everybody goes around recording these days….the problem is how do you categorize these things?…If you could develop good artificial intelligence machine learning tools, then you could do something like Alan Lomax was trying to do (build an ethnomusicology recording archive).” – Michael Frishkopf

Michael Frishkopf is a Professor of Music at the University of Alberta, an ethnomusicologist, performer, and composer. Dr. Frishkopf’s ethnomusicological research interests include music of the Arab world; Sufi music; sound in Islamic ritual performance; music and religion; comparative music theory; the sociology of musical taste; social network analysis; (virtual [world) music]; digital music repositories; deep learning for sound recognition and music information retrieval; music in West Africa; participatory action research; psychoacoustics and music cognition; music and global health; indigenous medicine and music as medicine for integrative health; and music for global human development and social change.

Artificial intelligence is having significant impacts on advancing medical research. Dr. Francois Bolduc is a pediatric neurologist, with deep expertise in understanding the genetic basis of memory and cognition. As both a clinician and researcher, Dr. Bolduc is using artificial intelligence to advance his research as well as serve patients. We talk about the role of big data and AI in genetic research and the challenges and opportunities in working as part of an interdisciplinary team. We also discuss how a chat bot developed by Dr. Bolduc’s team is helping autistic children and their parents by providing a medically sound, ongoing support system.

“One thing that AI brought is the ability to manage very complex data. We always had to reduce the information (about a patient), to some degree, to keep it within our working memory…what AI allows is these “external brains”….people are very complex and with AI, we are trying to capture all their information and not be biased in our selection criteria.”  – Francois Bolduc

Dr. Francois Bolduc is an Associate Professor of pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. His work focuses on identifying the molecular mechanisms underlying cognitive, behavioral, and social defects in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). He leads a lab that has developed several paradigms in Drosophila to model and quantitatively study the various defects seen in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. His team is using artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand the complex interactions modulating behavioral outcomes in animal models and human as well as developing a chatbot to better provide information to parents, health professionals, and educators involved with individuals with NDD.

When we think about technology and education, we often think about the ways in which we learn through technology, but we may not see how technologies shape education itself. Dr. Cathy Adams has been working at the intersection of education and technology, investigating how digital technologies shape knowledge practices. We reflect on the past, and how the now ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation has shaped learning. Looking to the future, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for AI technologies in education and their profound impacts that extend far beyond the classroom.

“As AI and machine learning are able to make more and more smart decisions for us we will increasingly be willing to off-load our own decision making to these technologies.” – Cathy Adams

Dr. Cathy Adams is a Professor and Vargo Teaching Chair in the Department of Secondary Education. Her research addresses digital technology integration across K-12 educational environments, with a focus on ethical, pedagogical and sociocultural issues. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on pedagogy of technology, educational technology integration, and computational thinking for teachers.

As constructed environments with clear parameters, games are an ideal proving ground for artificial intelligence research. Dr. Michael Bowling is equally passionate about games and AI. From his early days of robot soccer, to building an AI program and winning the World Championship of Poker (twice!) to his current research into theory of mind influenced by the cooperative card game Hanabi, Dr. Bowling takes a playful approach in using games to solve big, complex, challenges.

“We (as humans) can communicate a great deal by letting the background information or the inferences communicate the information…we do not have any computer algorithms that do that….(but) could a game help us get there?….We’re actually starting to make progress which is really exciting.” – Michael Bowling 

Dr. Michael Bowling is a professor in Computing Science, Fellow in the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and a senior scientist at DeepMind. His research is driven by his fascination in the problem of how computers can learn to play games through experience. He led the Computer Poker Research Group, which has built some of the best poker playing programs in the world.