Around 140 participants from 21 local and overseas organizations gathered at the annual workshop on 24 November 2021, predominantly online.
The half-day workshop was jointly organized by academics from the National University of Singapore, Tsinghua University of China, with support from Sea AI Lab (SAIL) and the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. 14 speakers presented their latest research findings centered around the theme of "Robust and Explainable AI with Human in the Loop".
Professor Maosong Sun and Professor Tat Seng Chua, the co-Director of NExT++ Research Center expressed their gratitude to the participants and subsequently shared the latest research development of NExT++.
Among the keynote speakers was Professor Shuicheng Yan, who is the Group Chief Scientist of Sea Group and SAIL. He introduced the establishment of Sea AI Lab and Sea-NExT Joint Lab and the key paths towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With SAIL and NExT as the joint research vehicles, he believes that there will be a direct commercial and societal impact to deploy high-quality research output into real-world applications.
"We must be cognizant of the future technology we are going to develop and how they could impact our future society."
Professor Dame Wendy Hall
During Session 2, Professor Dame Wendy Hall highlighted the importance of the ethical responsibility of using AI in our society. Students including those from non-computer science disciplinary should learn AI and be more conscious of the possible impacts of AI that could do on our society. Professor Hall is also the co-Director of NExT++ Research Center and Executive Director of Web Science Institute.
Besides the technical talks, a panel discussion was held to discuss the potential research angle in Conversational AI. All panelists concurred on the importance of Conversational AI and it is timely to look into those emerging issues.
At the end of the workshop, Academician Bo Zhang, who is the Executive Dean of Tsinghua University's Institute for Artificial Intelligence, presented the closing keynote on the Third Generation AI.
Other technical talks were delivered by Dr. Min Lin (on Game AI); Professors Jie Tang, Peng Cui, Fuli Feng, An Zhang (on Robust and Trustable AI); Professors Wei Tsang Ooi, Minlie Huang, Zhiyuan Liu, Yiqun Liu, Min Lin, Lizi Liao (on Human and Conversation AI).