This year’s AI Forum, the fourth of its kind, is being held over two days this November 2 and 3. The second day of the event, hosted by Samsung Research, the advanced R&D hub of the company that leads the development of future technologies for Samsung Electronics’ SET (end-products) business, facilitated discussion around how industry experts and academics alike can further research into AI technologies, products, and services that directly impact and enhance the lives of all people.

AI Forum Day 2: Human-Centered AI

To open up the second day of the AI Forum 2020 on November 3, Dr. Sebastian Seung, President and Head of Samsung Research, gave a welcome speech that highlighted how the theme of the Forum’s second day, “Human-Centered AI,” is very much in line with Samsung’s vision of creating products and services that make all our lives richer and more convenient.

Dr. Seung outlined the importance of collaboration between corporate and academic AI researchers. “Unlike academic researchers, who have greater freedom to explore their professional interests, corporate researchers dealing with real-world issues often encounter constraints in their research,” explained Dr. Seung. “To overcome such restraints, companies are driven to find creative ways to problem-solve and to conduct truly innovative research.”

Dr. Seung went on to outline the areas in which Samsung has been progressing its AI research, highlighting how the company has been expanding its research into traditional AI fields such as vision and graphics, speech and language and robotics. He noted that the company has also been making great efforts with their on-device AI, with work being done to develop how AI functions on devices with limited computational power, limited electrical power consumption and other such constraints. He also highlighted the company’s focus on the field of health and wellness, stressing it as a very fascinating area wherein AI, data and devices can come together to benefit people in their health and wellness journeys.

In order to showcase the big picture within which AI research exists, Dr. Seung then presented a range of Samsung products that are infused with AI technologies, noting the existing technical challenges that Samsung and other AI researchers around the world should be looking to surmount in order to extend the capability of AI as much as possible to help people. “AI research for a better world only begins when we think deeply about how AI is capable of improving our lives and changing human behavior for the better,” concluded Dr. Seung.

Expert Highlights: Keynote Speeches

For the second day of the Samsung AI Forum 2020, some of the most prolific experts in AI worldwide were invited to participate in the Forum’s lectures and discussions. Professor Christopher Manning of Stanford University, a world-renowned scholar in the field of natural language processing (NLP), gave a presentation titled Natural Language Understanding and Conversational AI. Professor Manning shared the current status and latest trends in NLP technologies, highlighting the recent rapid development of such technologies, and introduced more accurate conversational agents and more effective open domain social robots based on them. Professor Devi Parikh of the Georgia Institute of Technology gave a lecture titled Multimodal and Creative AI Systems, in which she described her work into computer vision systems that humans can interact with via language and AI systems that can assist humans with their creative and artistic endeavors.

Professor Subbarao Kambhampati of Arizona State University, a founding board member of the nonprofit The Partnership on AI, gave a lecture titled Synthesizing Interpretable Behavior for Human-Aware AI Systems. Using several case studies from his research, Professor Kambhampati highlighted the growing need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans in everyday life and asserted that, for this to happen, the systems need to exhibit behavior interpretable by humans.

Lastly, Daniel D. Lee, Executive Vice President of Samsung Research, Head of Samsung’s AI Center in New York and Professor at Cornell Tech, delivered a lecture under the theme AI for Robots and People. He examined the technologies being used in the latest machine learning algorithms and explained how they can be used both to develop more advanced robotics systems and to improve people’s everyday lives.

Stay tuned to Samsung Newsroom for more information on the Samsung AI Forum 2020.

This year’s AI Forum, the fourth of its kind, is being held over two days this November 2 and 3. The first day of the event, hosted by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Samsung’s R&D hub dedicated to cutting-edge future technologies, is enabling participants to facilitate discussions around how to make the best use of AI technologies in a way that can benefit our daily lives in a rapidly changing world, particularly within the context of the unprecedented situations that have arisen recently due to the global pandemic.

AI Forum Day 1: The Past, Present and Future of AI

On November 2, Dr. Kinam Kim, Vice Chairman & CEO of Device Solutions at Samsung Electronics, commemorated the start of the first day of the AI Forum 2020 by delivering an opening speech that highlighted how AI technologies have shown remarkable progress over the years. He went on to note that, given these changes, many are expecting AI to address the issues brought on by the recent pandemic, but highlighted that since AI bases its models on massive amounts of real-life data and simulations, the task of modeling the current pandemic and other natural disasters with AI was a daunting one.

Dr. Kim went on to provide his own views on the ways in which AI technologies can move forward and be harnessed to have meaningful impact on real world problems, and also highlighted that Samsung Electronics, as a major provider of core technologies in the AI ecosystem, is proactively co-operating with global researchers to seek solutions to such real world problems. Dr. Kim ended his opening speech with the expectation that meaningful discussions on the present and future of AI technologies and their benefit for humanity were set to take place during this year’s Forum.

Recognizing Leading Talent in the Field

At this year’s AI Forum, Samsung introduced their inaugural Samsung AI Researcher of the Year awards with the view to identify prominent emerging researchers in the field from around the world and to support their research activities.

This year’s Samsung AI Research of the Year awards went to Professor Kyunghyun Cho of New York University, Professor Chelsea Finn of Stanford University, Professor Seth Flaxman of Imperial College London, Professor Jiajun Wu of Stanford University and Professor Cho-Jui Hsieh of UCLA.

Professor Kyunghyun Cho, a globally recognized researcher in natural language processing, has been publishing a consistent stream of acclaimed papers across the medicine, biology and optimization disciplines. “I am honored to have received a Samsung AI Researcher of the Year award and am committed to developing AI-focused research further down the road,” said Professor Cho of the recognition.

Expert Highlights: Keynote Speeches

Professor Yoshua Bengio, who served as this year’s co-chair and was selected as Samsung AI Professor of the Year, gave a presentation titled Towards Discovering Casual Representations. In his lecture, Professor Bengio explained that, up until now, conventional deep learning technologies have been relying on inference to recognize sensual information and learn from it, but AI technologies that are instead capable of learning the causality between hidden variables before drawing conclusions could be capable of making inferences just as humans do, and hence would be able to respond to unprogrammed situations. With visions of such a type of AI in mind, Professor Bengio shared the initial outcomes of his research and suggested how, based on this, AI technologies can make steps forward.

Professor Yann LeCun of New York University, a researcher who pioneered the Convolutional Neural Network widely applied to video recognition technologies, presented his latest model related to Self-Supervised Learning. Unlike supervised learning which returns a given answer to each given data set, self-supervised learning adopts a learning model consisting of autonomously creating questions within data and subsequently finding answers. Such a method has been applied to a massive linguistic model capable of generating sentences just as people do. Professor LeCun highlighted how self-supervised learning is similar to the way children experience and learn the world, and presented an energy-based model based on such a comparison.

Professor Chelsea Finn of Stanford University, a young researcher in the spotlight within the field of meta learning, gave a lecture titled From Few-Shot Adaptation to Uncovering Symmetries. In her lecture, Professor Finn introduced meta learning technologies in which AI, in spite of changes in data, can adapt swiftly to untrained data, and proceeded to share success stories of the application of these technologies in the areas of robotics and new drug candidate material design.

Professor Donhee Ham, Fellow at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Professor at Harvard University, delivered a presentation titled Reconstruction of the Brain. In his presentation, he highlighted that the current level of AI is based on the human brain but in fact works in a way different from how the brain functions, causing limitations to its capability. Professor Ham introduced cutting-edge neural science technologies that could mimic the structure and functionalities of the human brain circuit and create computer integrated circuits on their own.

Industry experts also took part in giving presentations. Dr. Tara Sainath of Google Research released the latest research outcomes of end-to-end models developed for speech recognition capable of enhancing the accuracy, efficiency and multi-lingual capability of voice assistant services widely available across smart devices.

Dr. Jennifer Wortman Vaughan of Microsoft Research gave a lecture titled Intelligibility Throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle. She shared a human-centric machine learning concept, highlighting that, in order to develop a fair machine learning system capable of garnering the trust of people, people’s clear understanding of the system is required. Dr. Wortman Vaughan then introduced research outcomes that can objectively verify such a mechanism.

Since the Samsung AI Forum 2020 was held virtually this year, students and researchers alike in the AI research field from all over the world were able to engage in online discussions and exchanges. When tuning in to the Forum’s lectures on Samsung Electronics’ YouTube channel, attendees could ask questions to and receive answers from the distinguished speakers thanks to a real-time chat functionality.

Stay tuned to Samsung Newsroom for more information on the Samsung AI Forum 2020.

Day 1: AI Technologies for Changes in the Real World

On Day 1, which will be hosted by Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Samsung’s R&D hub dedicated to cutting-edge future technologies, Dr. Kinam Kim, Vice Chairman & CEO of Device Solutions at Samsung Electronics will deliver opening remarks. Renowned AI experts will subsequently give presentations under the theme “AI Technologies for Changes in the Real World.”

This year, Dr. Inyup Kang, President of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics will join the panel discussion with the presenters. Topics for in-depth discussions include: challenges that need to be overcome on a global level through AI technologies over the next decade; limitations that AI faces in tackling real-world issues such as a pandemic or climate change; and whether humans need human-level AI, among other topics.

Day 1 Sessions:

• “Towards Discovering Causal Representations” by Prof. Yoshua Bengio, the University of Montreal
• “Self-Supervised Learning” by Prof. Yann LeCun, New York University
• “Meta-Learning: From Few-Shot Adaptation to Uncovering Symmetries” by Prof. Chelsea Finn, Stanford University
• “Reconstruction of the Brain” by Prof. Donhee Ham, Fellow at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Professor at Harvard University
• “Intelligibility Throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle” by Dr. Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Microsoft Research
• “End-To-End Models for Speech Recognition” by Dr. Tara Sainath, Google Research

Professor Yoshua Bengio, the winner of the 2018 Turing Award, often referred to as “the Nobel Prize in computing,” is assuming co-chairmanship for the forum, and the newly established “Samsung AI Researcher of the Year” award will be presented at the event.

The awardee of the “Researcher of the Year” honor is selected among global AI researchers under the age of 35 through extensive evaluations and assessments made by AI experts at both Samsung Electronics and renowned academic institutions. On the first day of the forum, the award ceremony will be held to present the USD 30,000 prize and the awardee will give a presentation.

Additionally, Samsung has named Professor Yoshua Bengio as “Samsung AI Professor.” As the co-chair of the forum with Dr. Sungwoo Hwang, President and Head of SAIT, Professor Bengio will utilize his wide networks and expertise in the field of deep learning to broaden cooperation for expanding the boundaries of AI research at Samsung Electronics.

“We have an outstanding set of speakers and discussion topics which promise to shed light on both the limitations of current AI technologies, which raise both practical and theoretical questions, and research directions aimed at reaching human-level intelligence,” said Professor Yoshua Bengio.

Day 2: Human-Centered AI

Day 2 sessions will be hosted by Samsung Research, the advanced R&D hub of the company that leads the development of future technologies for Samsung Electronics’ SET (end-products) Business. Under the theme “Human-Centered AI,” Dr. Sebastian Seung, President and Head of Samsung Research, will deliver the keynote speech, and AI experts who have been actively engaging in AI research activities worldwide will share their insights.

Day 2 Sessions:

• “Natural Language Processing” by Prof. Christopher Manning, Stanford University
• “Vision” by Prof. Devi Parikh, the Georgia Institute of Technology
• “Human Robot Interaction” by Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University
• “Robotics” by Prof. Daniel D. Lee, Cornell Tech, Executive Vice President at Samsung Research and Head of Samsung AI Center-New York

Professor Christopher Manning, a renowned expert in natural language processing (NLP), will speak on the current status and future of NLP technologies required for Human-Centered AI. He previously delivered the keynote speech at the first Samsung AI Forum in 2017 on the development of neural network-based natural language understanding technology. Samsung has been working with Professor Manning on Q&A and dialogue modeling and will continue to collaborate with him on the overall development of NLP technologies.

After the presentations, Sebastian Seung, a pioneer in AI research based on neuroscience, will preside over an in-depth panel discussion with the four speakers regarding the prospects and future direction of Human-Centered AI.

“We hope that Samsung AI Forum 2020 will contribute to enhanced understanding of AI technology developments and its applications that can bring positive impact to human lives,” said Seung. “Especially since this year’s forum will be held online, I hope that the event will be an opportunity for greater participation of those interested in AI technologies.”

The event will be open to pre-registered attendees. Registration is available through the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology website and the Samsung Research website starting October 6.