Jie Yang | Human-Centered Computing for Robust AI

26 OCTOBER 2023

Artificial Intelligence is used more and more in society, from healthcare to transport and finance. Along with the rapid increase of AI adoption come increased concerns about the inherent robustness issues of such technologies and the social, and ethical implications. To create AI systems that can properly serve humans, it is crucial to put humans at the center of the process such that the outcome system behaves in a way that fits the cognition and value of people in the contexts of use. This poses new technological challenges: how to build AI systems that can be understood by humans and that can align their behaviour with human values? Tackling these challenges requires new ways of looking at the computational roles humans can and should play in both developing and using AI. In this talk, I will present our recent work on human-centered computing for understanding and improving the robustness of AI systems, by connecting AI with human reasons and values.

Jie Yang is an assistant professor at TU Delft, where he leads the Human Language Technologies community and co-directs the Delft Design@Scale AI Lab. Before, Jie was a scientist at Amazon and senior researcher at the University of Fribourg - Switzerland. His research focuses on human-in-the-loop approaches for trustworthy machine learning, especially natural language processing. His work has received five best paper awards and nominations, including TheWebConf/WWW (2022 & 2023), AAAI/ACM AIES (2023), AAAI HCOMP (2022), and ACM HT (2017). The work finds application across a wide range of societal domains, via collaboration with medical centres, libraries, banks, etc. Jie serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Human Computation and Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence, regularly serves on the senior program committees of TheWebConf/WWW, AAAI, and CIKM, and reviews journals and transactions such as IEEE TKDE, ACM TOIS, TWeb, TiiS, and TIST.