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Dick Bulterman

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & CWI, The Netherland

Are Micro-Breweries the Model for Semantic Computing?​

 

Abstract: Throughout history, society has been subjected to a series of fundamental changes that have unsettled the intellectual and social status quo. These changes have been both technical (such as the invention of the printing press, the industrial revolution, the deployment of social media) and economic (such as the invention of capitalism). The large deployment of semantic computing is likely to be the ‘next big thing’ in both technical and economic realms. The mantra driving much of the semantic computing revolution has been that ‘bigger is better’. While this appears fundamentally true in the bootstrap phase of any technology, there are signs that scale alone is not sufficient for future growth and impact of semantic computation.

This talk reflects on the history of both technological and economic growth and looks at alternatives for semantic computing that may provide a more useable long-term basis for secure, explainable and reliable deployment of ‘intelligent’ system, where quality of information take precedence over quantity of investment

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Bio: Dick Bulterman is CWI Fellow at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, where he was senior researcher and head of the group Distributed and Interactive Systems from 1988 to 2014. He is also emeritus professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where was Chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2016-2018. From 2013-2016 he was President and CEO of FX Palo Alto Laboratories in California (USA). Between 1997 and 2002, Bulterman was the Managing Director of Oratrix Development bv, a CWI spin-off technology company. Before joining CWI, he was a professor of computer engineering at Brown University in Providence, RI.

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Bulterman has been active in the multimedia community since 1993 and has served in various roles on ACM MM organizing committees.  He is the chair of the ACM Web Conference steering committee and is a past chair of ACM SigWEB. He was a founding editorial board member of ACM TOMCCAP and ACM/Springer Multimedia Tools and Applications, and is associate editor of Springer Multimedia Systems. He is past chair of W3C's Synchronized Multimedia working group and was involved in the development of a host of W3C standards. He is the recipient of the ACM SIGMM Lifetime Technical Achievement Award (2014).

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Bulterman received a Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1981. 
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Paulo Shakarian

Syracuse University, USA

Artificial Metacognition: A Semantic Approach

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Abstract: The research trend of metacognitive AI deals with the study of artificial intelligence systems that can self-monitor and/or regulate resources. This concept has its roots in cognitive psychology studies on human metacognition. It has led to the understanding of how people monitor, control, and communicate their cognitive processes. An emerging research trend in artificial intelligence is to build systems that possess these capabilities. In this talk, we argue for a semantic approach to metacognition that relies on learned error detection rules. We describe a line of research that has shown that such an approach to metacognition has certain advantages, such as the ability to constrain a loss function, the ability to provide corrective re-prompts to an LLM, and the ability to reason about failures in out-of-distribution environments.

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Bio: Bio: Paulo Shakarian is the K.G. Tan Endowed Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Syracuse University. His academic accomplishments include four best-paper awards, over 100 peer-reviewed articles, 12 issued patents, and 8 published books. Shakarian has secured over $7 million in grant funding from various government and industry sponsors. Paulo’s work on the use of AI methods to predict software vulnerabilities was commercialized in a startup that was acquired in 2022. Previously, Shakarian held faculty positions at West Point and Arizona State. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland and a B.S. in computer science from West Point.

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