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” honour is selected among global AI researchers under the age of 35 through extensive evaluations and assessments made by AI experts at both Samsung 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 utilise 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 to 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 modelling 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 6th.

Acknowledging the rapid development and aiming to positively impact the future of AI technologies, Samsung joined PAI to shape the direction of AI development along with global member companies. As a member of PAI, Samsung will join one of its working groups, Collaboration Between People and AI Systems ^[1] and research possible collaboration between humans and AI. The company also plans to participate in research on topics including safety, transparency and the social and economic impacts of AI.

“Samsung is dedicated to producing AI products and services that are reliable and safe for people and beneficial to society,” said Cambridge Mokanyane, Chief Marketing Officer at Samsung South Africa. “As a member of the PAI, Samsung will strive to facilitate ongoing progress of artificial intelligence and develop best practices on AI technologies.”

Samsung now has a network of seven Global AI Centers in Seoul, Silicon Valley, New York, Cambridge, Moscow, Toronto and Montreal.

Located in the heart of Chelsea, the New York AI Centre will be led by Daniel D. Lee, Executive Vice President of Samsung Research and a global authority in AI robotics, who joined Samsung Electronics last June. With cooperation from a leading authority in neuroscience-based AI technologies, H. Sebastian Seung, Executive Vice President of Samsung Research, at the New York AI Centre will spearhead the advanced AI research in robotics. As the Chief Research Scientist of Samsung Electronics, Seung will also advise Samsung on advanced AI research in developing future business growth opportunities.

“What we need now is to focus on creating new values that make people’s lives easier and more convenient by harnessing the power of AI in Samsung’s products and services,” says Justin Hume, Director: Integrated Mobility at Samsung South Africa. “To do this, our Global AI Centres, including the New York AI Centre, must play a pivotal role.”

Samsung has announced plans to expand its advanced AI research capabilities to employ about 1,000 specialists by 2020. This will be Samsung’s sixth AI centre around the world, and it will work in partnership with Samsung’s other AI research facilities. The additional AI centres are in Korea, the U.K., Canada, Russia, and Silicon Valley, the U.S.

“We are excited to open a new Samsung AI centre in New York, which will specialize in robotics research,” says Hume. “New York is one of the world’s great cities, and with this new facility we will be able to leverage the tremendous talent in the area. We also look forward to collaborating with top universities and academic centres in the region.”

The facility is located at 123 West 18^th St, New York. The facility’s opening ceremony was held on September 7^th in New York City, with about 100 guests in attendance including President Kim; Seunghwan Cho, Executive Vice President of Samsung Research; Geunbae Lee, Head of Samsung AI Centre in Seoul; Professor Daniel P. Huttenlocher, the Dean of Cornell Tech; and Professor David Tank, Director of Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

“The field of AI has made revolutionary progress by finally embracing neural networks,” says Hume. “This is just the beginning of a new era of innovation in AI, and Samsung is proud to be part of this exciting quest.”

The global AI Centres will contribute to Samsung’s AI research with their unique regional strengths, and Samsung is expected to expand its AI centres to other technology and talent-rich areas to cement its place as a leader of AI research in the industry.

Attendees at the opening ceremony of Samsung’s AI Center in New York City come together to take a commemorative picture.

For more details on Samsung Research and the global AI Centres, please visit the official Samsung Research web page athttp://research.samsung.com.

Samsung Research, the advanced R&D hub of Samsung Electronics’ SET (end-products) business, has ranked first in two of the world’s top global artificial intelligence (AI) machine reading comprehension competitions.

Samsung Research recently placed first in the MAchine Reading COmprehension (MS MARCO) Competition held by Microsoft (MS), as well as showing the best performance in TriviaQA^* hosted by the University of Washington, proving the excellence of its AI algorithm.

With intense competition in developing AI technologies globally, machine reading comprehension competitions such as MS MARCO are booming around the world. MS MARCO and TriviaQA are among the actively researched and used machine reading comprehension competitions along with SQuAD of Stanford University and NarrativeQA of DeepMind. Distinguished universities around the world and global AI firms including Samsung are competing in these challenges.

Machine reading comprehension is where an AI algorithm is tasked with analyzing data and finding an optimum answer to a query on its own accord. For MS MARCO and TriviaQA, AI algorithms are tested in their capabilities of processing natural language in human Q&As and also providing written text in various types of documents such as news articles and blog posts.

For example in MS MARCO, ten web documents are presented for a certain query to let an AI algorithm create an optimum answer. Queries are randomly selected from a million queries from Bing (MS search engine) users. Answers are evaluated statistically by estimating how close they are with human answers. This is a test designed to apply an AI algorithm to solve real-world problems.

Samsung Research took part in the competitions with ConZNet, an AI algorithm developed by the company’s AI Center. ConZNet features skillful capabilities through adopting the Reinforcement Learning^** technique, which advances machine intelligence by giving reasonable feedback for outcomes, similar to a stick-and-carrot strategy in a learning process.

With the recent acceleration in global competition to develop AI technologies, contests are widespread in areas of computer vision (technologies to analyze characters and images) and visual Q&A to solve problems using recognized images of characters as well as machine reading comprehension. The Beijing branch of Samsung Research won the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) hosted by the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) in March, putting them in a top-tier group for global computer vision tests. The ICDAR is the most influential competition in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies.

“We are developing an AI algorithm to provide answers to user queries in a simpler and more convenient manner, for real life purposes,” said Jihie Kim, Head of Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Research. “Active discussion is underway in Samsung to adopt the ConZNet AI algorithm for products, services, customer response and technological development.”

^* Competitions such as MS MARCO and TriviaQA allow contestants to participate at any time, and rankings are altered according to real-time test results.

^** The Reinforcement Learning is the most advanced Machine Learning AI algorithm, and cutting-edge AI technologies including AlphaGo are upgrading machine intelligence by applying this technique.

The Language Understanding Lab led by Dr. Kim recently grabbed global attention after placing top ranks at global machine reading comprehension competitions held by Microsoft and the University of Washington, respectively. Samsung Newsroom visited the Samsung Research AI center in Seocho-gu, Korea to interview Dr. Kim about AI performance in the machine reading comprehension competitions and a future evolution plan for AI algorithms.

Jihie Kim, Head of the Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Research

Q. Please tell us about the MS MARCO and TriviaQA competitions held by Microsoft and the University of Washington, respectively, where your team ranked first place.

Kim: There have been many global machine reading competitions recently where AI presents solutions to a problem. MS MARCO and TriviaQA are among the top five global competitions in machine reading comprehension. AI algorithms are tested on whether they can understand and analyze questions to offer answers. Those tests are designed by referring to internet users’ queries and search results.

Q. What do you think was the critical factor in excelling at the AI competitions which require such high levels of technical expertise?

Kim: The ConZNet algorithm developed by the Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Reseach is upgrading its intelligence by considering real user environments. The algorithm takes natural language into account such as how people deliver queries and answers online. We were able to win those competitions because the MS MARCO and TriviaQA competitions are about AI capabilities in real user environments. In truth, our algorithm was a bit behind other competitors in tests requiring a simple answer to a question after analyzing a short paragraph. But because such technologies have low relevance to real environments using AI technologies, we are focusing on the other tests such as MS MARCO in proceeding with continuous R&D.

Q. Do you apply the winning algorithms to customer services in real life?

Kim: An Open Lab event was held recently to introduce the labs at Samsung Research to other departments in Samsung Electronics. At the event, we had in-depth discussions with engineers in our home appliances and smartphone departments about AI algorithms. Departments dealing with customer services also showed high interest in what we do because AI-based customer services including chatbots are emerging as a hot topic. We hope that our technologies developed at Samsung Research will be naturally adopted to Samsung Electronics products and services.

Dr. Kim and the developers of the Language Understanding Lab at Samsung Research are participating in an ideation meeting.

Q. What is your future evolution plan for advancing AI technologies in language understanding?

Kim: ConZNet is an acronym for “Context Zoom-in Network.” The name implies that understanding the context of what people say is critical. We need to advance AI technologies to help them understand and analyze short sentences. AI algorithms also need to have capabilities to analyze real-time news reports rather than existing data to give answers to customer queries. We are also developing technologies where an AI algorithm can answer, “there are no proper answers to your query,” as well as search for right answers. The so-called “rejection problem” is an AI technology with a high level of technical difficulties.

Q. Please tell us your ultimate goal in developing AI technologies.

Kim: The strengths of Samsung in the AI industry are that we can build a knowledge system about connections between machines and applications, and customer demands in the internet of things (IoT) environment comprised of personal devices, based on Samsung Electronics’ diverse product lineup. This will help us to achieve the goal of realizing a user-oriented AI system by collaborating with global partners in the industry. Samsung Electronics recently began to launch global AI Centers and we will lead the effort of working with AI experts at the new centers abroad.