Dear Students, Staff, and Faculty,
You are cordially invited to attend the keynote seminar by visiting scholar Dr. Sheila McIlraith.
When:
Thursday, March 12, 10:30 to 11:30am
Where:
Mitchell Hall, Room 395
Title: How (formal) language can help AI agents learn, plan, and remember.
Abstract:
Humans have evolved languages over tens of thousands of years to provide useful abstractions for understanding and interacting with each other and with the physical world. Language comes in many forms. In Computer Science and in the study of AI, we have historically used knowledge representation languages and programming languages to capture our understanding of the world and to communicate unambiguously with computers. In this talk I will discuss how (formal) language can help AI agents learn, plan, and remember in the context of reinforcement learning. I’ll show how we can exploit the compositional syntax and semantics of formal language and automata to aid in the specification of complex reward-worthy behaviour, to improve the sample efficiency of learning, and to help agents learn what is necessary to remember. In doing so, I argue that (formal) language can help us address some of the challenges to reinforcement learning in the real world.
Bio:
Sheila McIlraith is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Vector Institute), and an Associate Director and Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. McIlraith is the author of over 150 scholarly publications in the areas of knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning. Her work focuses on AI sequential decision making, broadly construed, through the lens of human-compatible AI. McIlraith is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow. She and co-authors have been recognized with a number of honours for their scholarly contributions including the 2011 SWSA Ten-Year Award, the ICAPS 2022 Influential Paper Award, and the 2023 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize. She also catalyzed and continues to co-lead the University of Toronto Embedded Ethics Education Initiative (E3I).