AIhub monthly digest: March 2024 – human-robot interaction, serverless computing, and deep reinforcement learning for communication networks

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we find out about explainability and human-robot interaction, serverless computing for machine learning, and deep reinforcement learning for communication networks. We also chat to AAAI President Francesca Rossi, and congratulate the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award winner Catholijn Jonker.

Interview with Francesca Rossi

“AI used to be a scientific and technical field, now it has become a socio-technical discipline.” AIhub ambassador Andrea Rafai caught up with AAAI President Francesca Rossi to ask about her research, regulation of AI, and the UN sustainable development goals: Interview with Francesca Rossi – talking sustainable development goals, AI regulation, and AI ethics.

Catholijn Jonker wins the 2024 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

Congratulations to Catholijn Jonker on winning the 2024 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award! This prestigious award is made for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. It is intended to recognize researchers in autonomous agents whose current work is an important influence on the field.

Meeting the AAAI Doctoral Consortium participants

The AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. We’re meeting the participants in a series of interviews to find out about their research, PhD life, and why they decided to study AI. This month, we caught up with Aaquib Tabrez, Raffaele Galliera and Amine Barrak.

Aaquib Tabrez focuses on explainable AI in the human-robot interaction space. In this interview, we find out more about his aim to make these systems more transparent, trustworthy and reliable across various human-robot team settings, including manufacturing, autonomous driving, and search and rescue operations.

Raffaele Galliera is working on deep reinforcement learning for communication networks. We spoke about his research projects on a reinforcement learning agent for congestion control and group communication, in particular, cooperative message dissemination.

We also chatted to Amine Barrak who is concerned with speeding up machine learning by using serverless computing. At the moment, his research is focussed on doing machine learning training efficiently in small serverless settings.

Further coverage of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Last month saw the running of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference. As part of the event, several workshops were held covering a range of AI-related topics. The organisers of some of these workshops have summarised their sessions in a series of posts:

• #AAAI2024 workshops round-up 1: Cooperative multi-agent systems decision-making and learning
• #AAAI2024 workshops round-up 2: AI for credible elections, and are large language models simply causal parrots?
• #AAAI2024 workshops round-up 3: human-centric representation learning, and AI to accelerate science and engineering

Milind Tambe is the winner of the 2024 AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, an award which recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways. Milind gave an invited talk at the conference in which he spoke about some of the work that won him the award. We summarised the presentation here.

Karen Hao on new data centres

In this article in The Atlantic, Karen Hao investigates the new data centres that are springing up at a dizzying rate, and wonders if the Earth can sustain them.

Joy Buolamwini wins Digital Civil Rights Award

Congratulations to Joy Buolamwini on being awarded the 2024 NAACP-Archewell Foundation Digital Civil Rights Award for her continued work in illuminating the social implications and harms of AI. Launched in 2022, the annual award celebrates a new generation of leaders who are creating transformational change at the intersection of social justice and technology, and working to advance civil and human rights.

EurAI dissertation award – nominations sought

Nominations are invited for the 2023 Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award sponsored by the European Association of Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). The award recognises superior research and writing by doctoral candidates in artificial intelligence. It is presented annually at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), with the winner invited to give a talk at the conference. The deadline for nominations is 31 May 2024 and you can find out more here.

Our resources page
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UN SDGs focus series
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Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.