Socially-aware AI

Speaker:        Prof. Alexandre Alahi
                Assistant Professor
                Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)

Title:          "Socially-aware AI"

Date:           Friday, 3 May 2019

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater K (near lift no. 31/32), HKUST

Abstract:

Transportation is at the dawn of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)
revolution with Autonomous Driving vehicles that are ever advancing. While
tremendous progress has been made in sensor design, data fusion,
classification, and planning based on the well-defined driving rules, the
current state of technology leads to unacceptable fatal accidents.
Autonomous Driving vehicles are not safe enough to effectively co-exist
with humans in the open world, and gain their trust. In this talk, I will
slingshot AI's remarkable progress and present a new type of AI to address
current challenges. I will share our latest results to address some of the
challenges using Deep Learning (from perception to planning tasks).


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Biography:

Alexandre Alahi is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL and the
director of the Visual Intelligence for Transportation Lab (vita.epfl.ch).
He received his Ph.D. from EPFL and spent five years at Stanford
University as a Post-doc and Research Scientist. He works on the
theoretical challenges and practical applications of socially-aware
Artificial Intelligence, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social
intelligence. His research enables machines to perceive the world and make
decisions in the context of transportation problems. He has collaborated
with multiple companies such as Honda, Samsung, Toyota, or Valeo. He was
awarded the Swiss NSF early and advanced researcher grants for his work on
predicting human social behavior. He won the CVPR Open Source Award (2012)
for his work on Retina-inspired image descriptors, and the ICDSC Challenge
Prize (2009) for his sparsity-driven algorithm that has tracked more than
100 million pedestrians to date. His research has been covered
internationally by BBC, abc, PBS, Euronews, Wall street journal, and other
national news outlets around the world. Alexandre has also co-founded
multiple startups such as Visiosafe, and won several startup competitions.
He was elected as one of the Top 20 Swiss Venture leaders in 2010.