Personal Digital Data: Challenges and Opportunities

Dr. Alon HALEVY, Research Director of Meta's Reality Labs Research will
deliver an IAS Distinguished Lecture on:-

Date:   2 May 2023 (Tuesday);
Time:   3:00pm - 4:30pm
Venue:  Kaisa Group Lecture Theater (IAS LT)
        Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST.

Title: "Personal Digital Data: Challenges and Opportunities"

Abstract:

The important question of how companies and organizations use our data has
received a lot of attention in the technology and policy communities. An
equally important question that deserves more focus going forward is how
we, as individuals, can take advantage of the data we generate to improve
our health, vitality, and productivity and our overall well-being. We
create a variety of data throughout our days, including our photos,
workout stats, locations we have been to, the stuff we buy online and the
content we consume. Soon smart glasses will record our experiences in even
more detail. However, our personal data is siloed in dozens of
applications. Consequently, we often struggle to retrieve important facts
from our past and build upon them to create satisfying experiences on a
daily basis.

This talk will start by outlining the opportunities that can be unlocked
if our data was fused in a way that serves us better. The speaker will
then discuss some of the technical challenges that arise in pursuing this
vision. In particular, the speaker will discuss recent developments on
combining language models and structured data, which is critical to this
agenda and to other applications of language models.

*********************
About the Speaker:

Dr. Alon HALEVY is a director at Meta's Reality Labs Research, where he
works on Human Value Alignment, the combination of neural and symbolic
techniques for data management and on responsible personal information
management. Prior to Meta, Dr. Halevy was the CEO of Megagon Labs
(2015-2018) and led the Structured Data Group at Google Research
(2005-2015), where the team developed WebTables and Google Fusion Tables.
From 1998 to 2005 he was a professor at the University of Washington,
where he founded the database group. Dr. Halevy is a founder of two
startups, Nimble Technology and Transformic Inc. (acquired by Google in
2005). He co-authored two books: The Infinite Emotions of Coffee and
Principles of Data Integration. In 2021 he received the Edgar F. Codd
SIGMOD Innovations Award. Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the ACM and a
recipient of the PECASE award and Sloan Fellowship. Together with his
co-authors, he received VLDB 10-year best paper awards for the 2008 paper
on WebTables and for the 1996 paper on the Information Manifold Data
Integration System.


For any enquiries, please feel free to contact:

The HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)
by Email:  or Tel: (852) 2358 5064

For Attendees' Attention
Seating is on a first come, first served basis.


IAS event
https://ias.hkust.edu.hk/events/personal-digital-data-challenges-and-opportunities