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Dear colleague,
We are happy to announce the next webinar in the Language Technology
webinar series organized by the HiTZ research center (Basque Center for
Language Technology, http://hitz.eus). You can check the videos of
previous webinars and the schedule for upcoming webinars here:
http://www.hitz.eus/webinars
Next webinar:
* *Speaker*: Heng Ji (University of Illinois)
* *Title*: SmartBook: an AI Prophetess for Disaster Reporting and
Forecasting
* *Date*: *Friday*, February 16, 2024 - 15:00 CET
* *Summary*: History repeats itself, sometimes in a bad way. If we
don’t learn lessons from history, we might suffer similar tragedies,
which are often preventable. For example, many experts now agree
that some schools were closed for too long during COVID-19 and that
abruptly removing millions of children from American classrooms has
had harmful effects on their emotional and intellectual health. Also
many wish we had invested in vaccines earlier, prepared more
personal protective equipment and medical facilities, provided
online consultation services for people who suffered from anxiety
and depression, and created better online education platforms for
students. Similarly, genocides throughout history (from those in
World War II to the recent one in Rwanda in 1994) have also all
shared early warning signs (e.g., organization of hate groups,
militias, and armies and polarization of the population) forming
patterns that follow discernible progressions. Preventing natural or
man-made disasters requires being aware of these patterns and taking
pre-emptive action to address and reduce them, or ideally, eliminate
them. Emerging events, such as the COVID pandemic and the Ukraine
Crisis, require a time-sensitive comprehensive understanding of the
situation to allow for appropriate decision-making and effective
action response. Automated generation of situation reports can
significantly reduce the time, effort, and cost for domain experts
when preparing their official human-curated reports. However, AI
research toward this goal has been very limited, and no successful
trials have yet been conducted to automate such report generation
and “what-if” disaster forecasting. Pre-existing natural language
processing and information retrieval techniques are insufficient to
identify, locate, and summarize important information, and lack
detailed, structured, and strategic awareness. We propose SmartBook,
a novel framework that cannot be solved by ChatGPT, targeting
situation report generation which consumes large volumes of news
data to produce a structured situation report with multiple
hypotheses (claims) summarized and grounded with rich links to
factual evidence by claim detection, fact checking, misinformation
detection and factual error correction. Furthermore, SmartBook can
also serve as a novel news event simulator, or an intelligent
prophetess. Given “What-if” conditions and dimensions elicited from
a domain expert user concerning a disaster scenario, SmartBook will
induce schemas from historical events, and automatically generate a
complex event graph along with a timeline of news articles that
describe new simulated events based on a new Λ-shaped attention mask
that can generate text with infinite length. By effectively
simulating disaster scenarios in both event graph and natural
language format, we expect SmartBook will greatly assist
humanitarian workers and policymakers to exercise reality checks
(what would the next disaster look like under these given
conditions?), and thus better prevent and respond to future disasters.
* *Bio*: Heng Ji is a professor at Computer Science Department, and an
affiliated faculty member at Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department and Coordinated Science Laboratory of University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is an Amazon Scholar. She is the
Founding Director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive
Conversational Experiences (AICE). She received her B.A. and M. A.
in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University, and her M.S.
and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University. Her research
interests focus on Natural Language Processing, especially on
Multimedia Multilingual Information Extraction, Knowledge-enhanced
Large Language Models, Knowledge-driven Generation and
Conversational AI. She was selected as a Young Scientist to attend
the 6th World Laureates Association Forum, and selected to
participate in DARPA AI Forward in 2023. She was selected as "Young
Scientist" and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future
of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017. She was
named as part of Women Leaders of Conversational AI (Class of 2023)
by Project Voice. The awards she received include "AI's 10 to Watch"
Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, NSF CAREER award in 2009,
PACLIC2012 Best paper runner-up, "Best of ICDM2013" paper award,
"Best of SDM2013" paper award, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination,
ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL2021 Best Demo Paper Award,
Google Research Award in 2009 and 2014, IBM Watson Faculty Award in
2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-2018. She was invited
by the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and AFRL to join Air Force
Data Analytics Expert Panel to inform the Air Force Strategy 2030,
and invited to speak at the Federal Information Integrity R&D
Interagency Working Group (IIRD IWG) briefing in 2023. She is the
lead of many multi-institution projects and tasks, including the
U.S. ARL projects on information fusion and knowledge networks
construction, DARPA ECOLE MIRACLE team, DARPA KAIROS RESIN team and
DARPA DEFT Tinker Bell team. She has coordinated the NIST TAC
Knowledge Base Population task since 2010-2021. She was the
associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio, Speech, and
Language Processing, and served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of
many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She is
elected as the North American Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023. Her research
has been widely supported by the U.S. government agencies (DARPA,
NSF, DoE, ARL, IARPA, AFRL, DHS) and industry (Amazon, Google,
Facebook, Bosch, IBM, Disney).
* *Upcoming webinars: * Smaranda Muresan (March 7, 2024)
* Ralf Schlüter (May 2, 2024)
* Marco Baroni (June 6, 2024)
Check past and upcoming webinars at the following url:
http://www.hitz.eus/webinars If you are interested in participating,
please complete this registration form:
http://www.hitz.eus/webinar_izenematea
If you cannot attend this seminar, but you want to be informed of the
following HiTZ webinars, please complete this registration form instead:
http://www.hitz.eus/webinar_info
Best wishes,
HiTZ Zentroa
P.S:HiTZ will not grant any type of certificate for attendance at these
webinars.
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