KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Josef van Genabith

Email:
Organization: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI GmbH
Phone: +49 681 85775 5287
Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/web/research/mlt

Josef van Genabith is a Scientific Director at DFKI, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where he heads the Multilingual Technologies Group, and jointly with Prof. Hans Uzskoreit, the Language Technology Lab. He is Professor of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at Saarland University, Germany. Previously he was the founding Director of CNGL (now ADAPT), the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, in Dublin, Ireland, and a Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University. His research interests include language technology, machine translation, parsing, generation, computer assisted language learning (CALL) and morphology. Currently he is coordinator of the QT21 H2020 research and innovation project on machine translation (http://www.qt21.eu/) and heads the EC SMART 2014/1074 service contract on European Language Resource Coordination ELRC (http://www.lr-coordination.eu/)

Keynote talk - Deep Neural Nets and Language Technologies

In this talk I will review some of the impact Deep Neural Nets (DNNs) are having on Language Technologies, concentrating on a few key areas, including challenges presented by morphologically complex languages and machine translation. I will also briefly consider the impact of DNNs on processing pipelines, interoperability (as in system engineering) and end-to-end training. I will outline benefits and end with a list of some of the currently open research questions.

Benedict du Boulay

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Organization: Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK
Homepage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/762

Benedict du Boulay is Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex. Following a Bachelors degree in Physics, he spent time both in industry and as a secondary school teacher before returning to university to complete his PhD working on Logo with primary school teachers in the 1970s. He is interested in (i) intelligent tutoring systems, particularly modelling and developing students’ metacognition and motivation, as well as (ii) the psychology of programming, particularly the issues facing beginners. He is President of the International Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education and has edited/written 8 books and written some 180 papers.

Keynote talk - Artificial Intelligence as an Effective Classroom Assistant

The field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) uses techniques from AI and cognitive science to understand better the nature of learning and teaching and to build systems to help learners gain new skills or understand new concepts. Over the years, many systems using various pedagogical techniques and topics have been built and evaluated. An overall picture of the effectiveness of such systems is starting to emerge. This talk describes a number of recent meta-reviews and meta-analyses to make the case for blended learning, wherein the teacher can confidently offload some work to AIED systems.

Barry O'Sullivan

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Organization: Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Cork, Ireland
Homepage: https://www.insight-centre.org/users/barry-osullivan

Professor O'Sullivan serves as Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork (UCC). At UCC he holds the Chair of Constraint Programming. He served as Head of Department from September 2012 to August 2015. He leads Insight's research group on optimisation and decision analytics, and is responsible for Insight's strategic engagement in European initiatives, such as Horizon 2020. Professor O'Sullivan was elected a Fellow of ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), and a Senior Member of AAAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in 2012. Professor O’Sullivan was President of the International Association for Constraint Programming from 2007-2012; he is the current Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland; coordinator of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics Working Group on Constraints; and Council Member of the Analytics Society of Ireland, which is a member of the International Federation Of Operational Research Societies. In 2013 he received a UCC Leadership Award and won the Association for Constraint Programming Distinguished Service Award in 2014.

Keynote talk - From Stable Marriages to the Cost of Popularity

Matching problems involving preferences are ubiquitous. For example, we may be interested in matching agents with each other as in the case of carpooling, or agents with services as in the case of allocating interns to hospital, etc. In this talk I will given an overview of some techniques associated with matching under preferences. I will review the concepts of stable matching and other forms of optimality in these contexts. I will highlight a number of application domains in which matching theory is important, and give some views on the directions of this interesting field at the intersection of discrete mathematics, graph theory, and algorithms, focusing specifically on how constraint programming can be used in this area.