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Special Seminar: Elizabeth Bondi, "Translating AI to Impact: Uncertainty and Human-agent Interactions in Multi-agent Systems for Public Health and Conservation"

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Illinois Computer Science
Location
https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_we7cz5ad
Date
Mar 24, 2022   10:30 am  
Views
151
Originating Calendar
Computer Science Special Seminar Series

Link to Talk Video: https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_we7cz5ad

Abstract: AI is now being applied widely in society, including to support decision-making in important, resource-constrained efforts in conservation and public health. Such real-world use cases introduce new challenges, like noisy, limited data and human-in-the-loop decision-making. I show that ignoring these challenges can lead to suboptimal results in AI for social impact systems. For example, previous research has modeled illegal wildlife poaching using a defender-adversary security game with signaling to better allocate scarce conservation resources. However, this work has not considered detection uncertainty arising from noisy, limited data. In contrast, my work addresses uncertainty beginning in the data analysis stage, through to the higher-level reasoning stage of defender-adversary security games with signaling. I introduce novel techniques, such as additional randomized signaling in the security game, to handle uncertainty appropriately, thereby reducing losses to the defender. I show similar reasoning is important in public health, where we would like to predict disease prevalence with few ground truth samples in order to better inform policy, such as optimizing resource allocation. In addition to modeling such real-world efforts holistically, we must also work with all stakeholders in this research, including by making our field more inclusive through efforts like my nonprofit, Try AI.

Bio: Elizabeth Bondi is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University advised by Prof. Milind Tambe. Her research interests include multi-agent systems, remote sensing, computer vision, and machine learning, especially applied to conservation and public health. She has been recognized as an MIT EECS Rising Star in 2021, and has been awarded the Best Paper Runner Up at AAAI 2021, Best Application Demo Award at AAMAS 2019, Best Paper Award at SPIE DCS 2016, and an Honorable Mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program in 2017. She has also founded Try AI, a nonprofit devoted to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field of AI.

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