•   When: Friday, February 18, 2022 from 02:00 PM to 03:00 PM
•   Speakers: Lu Cheng
•   Location: ZOOM only
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Abstract: 

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have become increasingly pervasive, offering both promises and perils. In response, researchers and organizations have been working to publish principles for the responsible use of AI. To bridge from these principles to responsible AI practice, in this talk, I will introduce an interdisciplinary definition of Socially Responsible AI (SRAI) and its algorithmic solutions through three human-centered operations -- to Protect, Inform, and Prevent. To materialize AI for good, for example, the protecting dimension aims to cover or shield humans from harm, injury, and negative impact; the informing dimension aims to deliver the facts or information in a timely way; the preventing dimension aims to prevent/mitigate the negative impact of AI algorithms. I will use representative tasks in social media mining to illustrate each of the three operations. In particular, I will introduce my recent work in session-based cyberbullying detection, causal understanding of disinformation dissemination, and unintended bias mitigation to elucidate how SRAI can protect and inform users, as well as mitigate AI’s societal harms. Finally, I will touch upon future work with themes focused on advancing AI algorithms and AI for social good. 

Short Bio:

Lu Cheng is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) at Arizona State University (ASU). Advised by Prof. Huan Liu, Lu's research focuses on bridging from conceptual AI principles to responsible AI practice using both statistical and causality-aware methods. Lu's work has appeared in and been invited to top venues for AI (e.g., AAAI, IJCAI), data mining (e.g., KDD, WWW, WSDM), and NLP (e.g., ACL). She is the web chair of WSDM'22 and senior program committee member of AAAI'22. Lu was the recipient of the 2021 ASU Engineering Dean's Dissertation Award, 2020 ASU Graduate Outstanding Research Award, 2021 ASU CIDSE Doctoral Fellowship, 2019 ASU Grace Hopper Celebration Scholarship, IBM Ph.D. Social Good Fellowship, and Visa Research Scholarship.