Opening Speaker

Audrey Tang Minister without Portfolio, Executive Yuan

Digital Social Innovation: Taiwan Can Help

Abstract

When we see “internet of things”, let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality”, let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see “machine learning”, let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience”, let’s make it about human experience.
When we hear “the singularity is near”, let us remember: the Plurality is here.

Bio

Audrey Tang is currently Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation. Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.

In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan national development council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project.

In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”

Keynote Speaker

Yolanda Gil University of Southern California

Embedding the Scientific Record on the Web: Towards Automating Scientific Discoveries

Bio

Dr. Yolanda Gil is Director of Knowledge Technologies at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences. She is also Director of the USC Center for Knowledge-Powered Interdisciplinary Data Science. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on artificial intelligence. Her research is on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture and discovery, which she investigates in a variety of projects concerning scientific discovery, knowledge-based planning and problem solving, information analysis and assessment of trust, semantic annotation and metadata, and community-wide development of knowledge bases. Dr. Gil collaborates with scientists in many domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, social knowledge collection, computer-mediated collaboration, and automated discovery. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Past Chair of its Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence. She is also Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and was elected as its 24th President in 2016.

Keynote Speaker

Sir Nigel Shadbolt University of Oxford

Architectures for Autonomy: Towards an Equitable Web of Data in the Age of AI

Bio

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, led the development of the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website. In 2010, he joined the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board – overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.

Nigel has a degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Newcastle and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. In 1983 he joined the Department of Psychology at Nottingham where he established and led a vibrant AI group. In 1992 he became the Allan Standen Professor of Intelligent Systems. He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000. At Southampton he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group. At Oxford he has centred his research in human centred AI in a wide range of applications. Most recently he was asked to lead the setting up of the Oxford Institute of Ethics in AI.

With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.

Keynote Speaker

Wei-Ying Ma ByteDance

Democratizing Content Creation and
Dissemination through AI Technology

Abstract

With the rise of mobile video, user-generated content, and social networks, there is a massive opportunity for disruptive innovations in the media and content industry. It is now a fast-changing landscape with rapid advances in AI-powered content creation, dissemination and interaction technologies. I believe the current trends are leading us towards a world where everyone is equally empowered to produce high-quality content in video, music, augmented reality or more – and to share their information, knowledge, and stories with a large global audience. This new AI-powered content platform can further lead to innovations in advertising, e-commerce, online education, and productivity. I will share the current research efforts at ByteDance connected to this emerging new platform through products such as Douyin and TikTok, and discuss the challenges and the direction of our future research.

Bio

Wei-Ying Ma is a Vice President and the Head of AI Lab at ByteDance. He is responsible for fundamental research and technology development in areas including machine learning, computer vision, speech and audio processing, natural language processing, personalized recommendation and search. The technologies from his teams have been used by hundreds of millions of users daily through ByteDance's content platforms and core products such as Jinri Toutiao and Douyin. Prior to ByteDance, Wei-Ying Ma was an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia. He developed many technologies that were successfully transferred to Microsoft’s Bing, Ads Center, Cognitive Services, Exchange, SharePoint, Azure, and Xiaoice. He has contributed to many open-sourced technologies at GitHub, including the Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit, Microsoft Graph Engine and Microsoft Concept Graph.

Wei-Ying Ma has published more than 300 papers at international conferences and in journals. He has been granted with more than 160 patents. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has served as program co-chair of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW) 2008 and the general co-chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2011. He has served on many editorial boards including ACM Transactions on Information System (TOIS), the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, and the Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications. He was a member of International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee from 2010 to 2016. He was awarded a Distinguished Alumni from the EECS of National Tsing Hua University in 2010. He received the honor to deliver a Distinguished Lecture at University of California at Santa Barbara ECE 50th Anniversary in 2013.