Join us for “A Journey through Artificial Intelligence” lecture series

Arqus presents a lecture series on Artificial Intelligence (AI) designed for a non-expert audience to break down complex AI concepts and make them accessible to everyone.

The JAI webinars aim at explaining artificial intelligence to the general public in a simple way. All sessions are planned to be held both in person and online. Registration is required.

Session 1: Artificial Intelligence. The long and winding road

• By José L. Verdegay (University of Granada)
• Date: 23 October 2024
• Time: 16:00 – 18:00 CEST
• Location: Salón de Grados, ETSI Informática y de Telecomunicación, University of Granada and online (link will be provided upon registration)

This talk will look at the origins, present and possible future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from a fundamental perspective, to make it easier to understand for anyone without technical knowledge in the field. At this level, the most commonly used approaches, methods and techniques in AI will be described, with an emphasis on how computers make decisions.

Lecturer: José L. Verdegay (University of Granada)

José Luis Verdegay Galdeano is Professor Emeritus at the University of Granada (UGR), where he has been a Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence since 1990, and Director of the Optimization and Decision Models Working Group.

He has held numerous positions at the UGR, in the Interministerial Scientific and Technical Commission (CICyT), in the EuropeanPe Training Foundation and in the TEMPUS Office of the European Union. From 2008 to 2015 he was the UGR Rector’s delegate for ICT. Between 2015 and 2023 he was Regional Director of the Ibero-American Postgraduate University Association (AUIP) and from April 2023 until his appointment as Emeritus, he was the Director of the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

With more than 55 research projects led, 32 published books, the latest of which is “Artificial Intelligence for Apprentices, Schoolchildren, Novices, Beginners and the General Public”, more than 400 scientific articles and 22 doctoral dissertations directed, he is in the top 1% of the world’s most influential scientists, according to Stanford University’s 2023 World Ranking of Scientists.

In the field of artificial intelligence, his current interest is in the study and development of Cooperative Automated Decision Systems.

Session 2: How do machines learn?

• By Juan Gómez-Romero (University of Granada)
• Date: TBC
• Time: 16:00 – 18:00 CET
• Location: Salón de Grados, ETSI Informática y de Telecomunicación, University of Granada and online (link will be provided upon registration)

In this talk, the basic ideas of how machines can “learn” will be outlined. A clear description of supervised/unsupervised learning and classification/regression problems will be provided. The last part of the talk will be devoted to discussing key topics around “generative AI”.

Lecturer: Juan Gómez-Romero (University of Granada)

Juan Gómez-Romero is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Granada, Spain. He previously held positions as a Lecturer and Researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His research centres on the application of artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, for the modelling, simulation, and analysis of cyber-physical and social systems. Professor Gómez-Romero has published extensively in these areas and actively contributes to AI-driven projects aimed at advancing sustainable development goals.

Session 3: AI & Education

• By Piotr Malak (University of Wrocław)
• Date: 5 November 2024
• Time: 14:00 – 15:00 CET
• Location: online (link will be sent upon registration)

This talk will focus on useful applications (tools) of AI, and especially GenAI, in education and research. We will practice prompt engineering to facilitate scholars’ and teachers’ work. We will also discover and discuss the limitations and threats of the usage of GenAI and the role of humans in GenAI-supported content creation. 

Piotr Malak, dr, is a researcher at the University of Wroclaw, and vice-director of the University Centre for Digital Humanities. His expertise covers a wide range of subjects related to information management from Information Retrieval, Text Classification, Machine Learning, and Knowledge Representation to GenAI development. He has led an R&D project on NLP/ML: An artificial intelligence system correlating employee teams with IT projects. Currently, as R&D Chief he is conducting research at the Development of a tool for generating immersive dialogues for NPCs based on large language models (LLM).

Session 4: AI alignment and value forks

• By Markus Kneer (University of Graz)
• Date: 14 November 2024
• Time: 16:00 – 18:00 CET
• Location:  IDea_Lab, Leechgasse 34, 8020 Graz, Austria & online (link to come)

Value alignment sounds simple: We want systems that use Artificial Intelligence to make decisions and produce outcomes consistent with our moral and societal values. In this talk, however, I’ll suggest that our ethical values informing what is the right course of action, or what should be done, can be sensitive to agent-type (human v. AI) and that this could constitute a complex problem for value alignment in different domains of application.

Lecturer: Markus Kneer (University of Graz)

Professor Markus Kneer holds the Chair for Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the IDea_Lab, University of Graz, and he is also the director of the Guilty Minds Lab. Previously, he was a research associate at the University of Zurich working on the philosophy of language, mind and moral psychology, and a fellow at the Digital Society Initiative (UZH), where he worked on ethics and AI.

Before that, I did a postdoc at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and was a Humanities and Neuroscience Fellow at Columbia University’s Italian Academy.

Contact

For more information or any questions, please contact: Lea Pesec (lea.pesec@uni-graz.at)