The UW Now

press release: Stream at the WAA YouTube channel.

March 14: Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms seem able to do many things once considered the sole purview of humans, from holding a conversation to creating works of art. This has led to widespread speculation about its current applications and the future of humanity in the age of AI.

On the next UW Now Livestream, a panel of UW-Madison experts will discuss the future of artificial intelligence. The program will be introduced by Mike Knetter, CEO of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association. The discussion will be moderated by guest host Tom Erickson, founding director of UW-Madison’s School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences.

Featured guests:

Blaine Hoak is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Sciences. She is focused on researching adversarial machine learning — specifically, understanding and designing sophisticated attacks that allow people to evaluate the trustworthiness of the machine learning systems we use today. Recently, she has also become interested in computational neuroscience and developing biologically plausible models with security in mind. Hoak has a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

Sharon Yixuan Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences. Her research interests are in deep learning — a branch of machine learning. She develops algorithms and fundamental understandings to enable reliable open-world learning, which can function safely and adaptively in the presence of evolving and unpredictable data streams. Prior to coming to UW–Madison, Li was a postdoctoral researcher in the computer science department at Stanford University, working with the Hazy Group. She is a recipient of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award (2022) and was named one of Forbes’s 30 under 30 in Science in 2020.

Jignesh Patel is a professor of computer sciences at UW–Madison. He leads a research group dedicated to developing more efficient methods of generating insights from data. His work focuses on improving both system efficiency (e.g., designing high-performance data analysis algorithms) and human efficiency (e.g., designing methods to improve the productivity of users interacting with data systems). He is the author of dozens of publications and has cofounded multiple successful companies, including Locomatix (2007), Quickstep (2015), and DataChat (2017). He is also the founder and organizer of the CS NEST Contest: an annual software contest to foster entrepreneurship on UW-Madison’s campus, which has helped spur several start-ups in Madison.