Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Alvaro Velasquez: Frontiers in Neuro-Symbolic AI: Going Beyond Vision and Language

Abstract: Foundation models, including Chat-GPT and its many variants, have come into prominence in the natural language processing (NLP) community thanks the ubiquity of text data readily available on the internet and the design of modern transformer architectures that can effectively learn from such data. However, domains at the frontier of AI, including supply chain optimization and sequential decision-making, are faced with additional challenges not present in NLP and vision. In this talk, we discuss some of these challenges and the promise of neuro-symbolic AI in addressing them. Speaker Bio: Alvaro Velasquez is a program manager at DARPA, where he currently leads programs on neuro-symbolic and adversarial AI. Before that, Alvaro oversaw the machine intelligence portfolio for the Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Alvaro is a recipient of the distinguished paper award from AAAI and best paper and patent awards from AFRL. He has authored over 80 papers and two patents and serves as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. Co-sponsored by: Center for Machine Learning at UMIACS, University of Maryland Speaker(s): Alvaro Velasquez Room: 4105, Bldg: Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, 8125 Paint Branch Dr, College Park, Maryland, United States, 20740, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/408959