Hoa Sen Research Seminar #123

1. “Optimisation Problems with Human-Factor based Constraints in Collaborative Artificial Intelligence” – Dr. Long Tran-Thanh from University of Southampton, UK to Hoa Sen Research Seminar

In the first session, it is our great pleasure to welcome Dr. Long Tran-Thanh from University of Southampton, UK to Hoa Sen Research Seminar. Dr. Long is currently a Lecturer in Computer Science at University of Southampton and he has been doing active research in a number of key areas of artificial intelligence (AI), mainly focusing on online machine learning, game theory, and incentive engineering. For his work, he has received a number of prestigious awards (CPHC/BCS PhD Dissertation Award, ECCAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award, Association for the AAAI Outstanding Paper). In this session Dr. Long will discuss “Optimisation Problems with Human-Factor based Constraints in Collaborative Artificial Intelligence”. This session will be useful for ones who are interested in AI or want to understand more about the AI world and the recent state-of-the-art approaches. Dr. Long will keep this a very high-level talk such that most people can understand.

Abstract:

With the recent fantastic breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as the latest success of AlphaGo or the advancements in robotics, comes along an increasing number of concerns about the dangers and threats these Ai technologies may bring to our society. These concerns may become so serious in the future that it would cause serious harms to further advancements of AI research. In fact, the root of these concerns lies within the fear of creating a superhuman Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that one day may decide to destroy the humankind.

To overcome these concerns, there have been many attempts to position AI as a set of more human-friendly and less threatening technologies.

A very promising direction of these attempts is the concept of collaborative AI. This concept significantly differs from the AGI approach, as instead of focusing on creating superhuman competitors, it still keeps the human factor at the centre of its objectives. In particular, collaborative AI provides technologies that aim to ease our everyday life in a supportive and ubiquitous way. As ubiquitous systems, such as Internet of Things, and their applications (e.g., smart homes, smart cars, or smart cities) are becoming more and more successful, I argue that collaborative AI will also become a dominant concept in the (very) near future.

However, state-of-the-art collaborative AI is still in its infant stage, and it will have to overcome a number of obstacles in order to achieve maturity. In particular, most of the research challenges comes from the fact that there is a human factor in the loop, that introduces new and challenging constraints to the underlying optimisation problems we need to solve. In this talk, I will first describe in detail a number of new constraints introduced by the human factor, namely:

• (i) human participation motivation;
• (ii) flexible autonomy;
• (iii) agile teaming; 
• (iv) user privacy;
• and (v) cyber security.

In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the state-of-the-art research solutions within each abovementioned topic, some of which are results from our collaborations with Oxford and University of Southern California.

2. “Research method training: Coding qualitative data 2” – Dr. Do Hue Huong from Faculty of Languages and Culture Studies, Hoa Sen University

In the second session, Dr. Do Hue Huong from Faculty of Languages and Culture Studies, Hoa Sen University will provide the second tutorial on Qualitative Research, namely “Research method training: Coding qualitative data 2”.

In the first part last week, Dr. Huong has provided an overview of the data collection process in Qualitative Research and interesting discussions about combining Qualitative methods and Quantitative methods. The participants in the last week session can download the example dataset through the HSRS website http://kttm.hoasen.edu.vn/en/hoa-sen-research-seminar (select the session “Research method training: Coding qualitative data 1”).