AIxRoads is a one-day workshop to be held in Macao in August (10/11/12, 2019), in conjunction with the 28th International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence (https://ijcai19.org).
After many years of experimentation in research labs, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved into the arena of the real world. AI systems are currently used in many domains (e.g., medicine, finances and communication), outperforming humans in a broad range of acoustic-, visual- and natural language tasks.
This success may have several reasons: (a) the growth of computational resources and storage devices, (b) the availability of huge amounts of data (Internet), and (c) the development of smart learning algorithms. Progress is also due to the fact that researchers have managed to leverage and integrate discoveries made in disciplines that seemingly had little in common (Linguistics, Psychology, Mathematics, and Neuroscience). Different as they may be, these disciplines turn out to be complementary, yielding a virtuous circle, which is an asset, allowing us not only to build 'smart' artifacts, but also to improve our understanding of the human mind.
Finally, nature played an important role, as it inspired researchers by providing a model that, in order to be turned into sophisticated working solutions had to be understood, formalized and recast in engineering terms. Neural networks are a good example of this process as they represent a loose, yet very effective, imitation of the neural system. State-of-the-art neural architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks and Transformers, are directly inspired by biological (e.g., visual cortex) and cognitive (e.g., attention processes) models.
The goal of this workshop is to stimulate cross-fertilization between the different communities of the AI universe (e.g., Mathematicians, Linguists, Cognitive Scientists, Neuroscientists) in order to identify the knowledge needed to bridge the gap between Natural and Artificial Intelligence. More precisely, we would like to discuss whether and how the usage of knowledge concerning the human brain may enable engineers to produce better software.
Here are some of the questions for which we would like to find answers: