FFSE-2024 Keynotes

The 4th Forum on Frontiers of Science and Engineering (FFSE)

Towards Interdisciplinary Sustainability Research (ISR)

Lingnan University, Hong Kong, July 21 - 22, 2024


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Keynote Presentation


Challenges and Opportunities of Interpretable AI

Wenjun (Kevin) Zeng, Ph.D.

Chair Professor, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China

Abstract:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced tremendous growth and brought waves of excitement in the past decade, thanks to the advancement of deep learning technologies and more recently large generative AI models such as ChatGPT/Sora. However, the “black-box” nature of current AI technologies poses significant challenges on the trustworthiness of AI Models, which potentially will impede the adoption of AI, especially for mission critical applications, and be a road blocker for achieving Artificial General Intelligence. In this talk, we first present the concept of interpretable AI and highlight its importance as well as challenges. We then discuss the opportunities to address this issue, highlighting the concept and approaches of disentangled representation learning, and the interpretable and controllable process of AI content generation. We will also discuss some future trends.

Biography:

Wenjun (Kevin) Zeng has been a Chair Professor and Vice President for Research of the Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), Ningbo, China since Oct. 2021. He is also the founding Executive President of the Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin (IDT). Prior to that, he was a Sr. Principal Research Manager and a member of the Senior Leadership Team at Microsoft Research Asia where he was leading the video analytics research powering the Microsoft Cognitive Services, Azure Media Analytics Services, Microsoft Office, Dynamics, and Windows Machine Learning. He was a professor with the Computer Science Dept. of Univ. of Missouri from 2003 to 2016. Prior to that, he worked for PacketVideo Corp, San Diego, CA, Sharp Labs of America, Camas, WA, Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, and Panasonic Technology, Princeton, NJ. He has contributed significantly to the development of international standards (ISO MPEG, JPEG2000, and Open Mobile Alliance). He received his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua Univ., the Univ. of Notre Dame, and Princeton Univ., respectively. He is on the Editorial Board of International Journal of Computer Vision, and was an Associate Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, or Steering Committee Member for a number of IEEE journals. He has served as the General Chair or TPC Chair for several IEEE flagship conferences (e.g., ICME’2018, ICIP’2017). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering.