Dr. Amir-Hossein Karimi

April 12, 2023, 11:30 am, EC4-2101A

Talk title:
Towards Trustworthy Human-Machine Collaboration

Abstract:
Advancements in technology such as the keyboard, mouse, touch-screens, voice-based communication, and today: data-enable interfaces (e.g., ChatGPT) have enabled more natural forms of interaction between humans and machines.

Despite seemingly magical experiences, many questions remain open:
* How does one recover from, or overturn, poor experiences via decisions made by AI?
* How does one assay the safety, factuality, and ethics of AI systems to foster trust in AI?
* How does one design systems that make use of the best of human and machine abilities?

I argue that the next step, and the solution to all these questions, is to continue the line of development above, and facilitate even more interaction, discussion, and communication between humans and intelligent agents with the ultimate goal of “intelligence augmentation” via “trustworthy human-machine collaboration.”

In this talk, I will describe efforts made to address these questions, as well as plans for future research.

Current bio:
Dr. Amir-Hossein Karimi is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at the University of Waterloo where he leads the Collaborative Human-AI Reasoning Machines (CHARM) Lab. The lab’s mission is to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence and chart the path for trustworthy human-AI symbiosis. In particular, the group is interested in the development of systems that can recover from or amend poor experiences caused by AI decisions, assay the safety, factuality, and ethics of AI systems to foster trust in AI, and effectively combine human and machine abilities in various domains such as healthcare and education. As such, the lab’s research explores the intriguing intersection of causal inference, explainable AI, and program synthesis, among others.

Amir-Hossein’s research contributions have been showcased at esteemed AI and ML-related platforms like NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, AISTATS, ACM-FAccT, and ACM-AIES, via spotlight and oral presentations, as well as through a book chapter and a highly regarded survey paper in the ACM Computing Surveys. Before joining the University of Waterloo, Amir-Hossein gained extensive industry experience at Meta, Google Brain, and DeepMind and offered AI consulting services worth over $250,000 to numerous startups and incubators. His academic and non-academic endeavours have been honoured with awards like the Spirit of Engineering Science Award (UofToronto, 2015), the Alumni Gold Medal Award (UWaterloo, 2018), the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018), the Google PhD Fellowship (2021), and the ETH Zurich Medal (2024).