Kolloquium WiSe 2022/23

Prof. Dr. Anne Lauscher

Data Science im Bereich Betriebswirtschaftslehre/Informatik, Universität Hamburg

When: Mo, 20.02.2023, at 17:15

Where: Konrad-Zuse-Hörsaal (Room B-201)

We are going to provide a livestream during the lecture. For the access data please register at https://mail-mm01.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/mailman/listinfo/kolloquium.

Topic

Towards Responsible Communication: Investigating Effective, Efficient, Fair, and Inclusive Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Language: english

Abstract

State-of-the-art Conversational AI systems seem to excel in terms of their conversational capabilities and will thus increasingly be part of our daily lives. However, they still exhibit a series of critical shortcomings, which pose a threat to responsible and societal beneficial future communication: for instance, these systems often fail to encode advanced knowledge (e.g., conceptual knowledge), are prone to encode and amplify unfair stereotypes (e.g., sexism), and are exclusive when it comes to speakers of underrepresented cultures and subcultures (e.g., individuals using neo-pronouns). In this talk, we will highlight some of our research results on these challenges and related solutions, as examples of the main focus areas of the newly established Data Science Group at the University of Hamburg.

Bio

Anne Lauscher is Associate Professor of Data Science at the University of Hamburg, where her research group investigates Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems with a focus on fair, inclusive, and sustainable communication. The professorship is funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German federation and the federal states.

Before, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Natural Language Processing group at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy) where she was working on introducing demographic factors into language processing systems with the aim of improving algorithmic performance and system fairness. She obtained her Ph.D., awarded with the highest honors (summa cum laude), from the Data and Web Science group at the University of Mannheim (Germany), where her research focused on the interplay between language representations and computational argumentation. During her studies, she conducted research internships at and became an independent research contractor for Grammarly Inc. (New York City, U.S.) and for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Seattle, U.S.). Her research gets regularly published at international top-tier Natural Language Processing (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, etc.) and Artificial Intelligence (e.g., AAAI) venues and has been recognized with multiple awards. For instance, in 2021, Anne received the Maria Gräfin von Linden-Award in life sciences/ STEM, which honors outstanding female researchers in the German State of Baden-Württemberg, and in 2022, she was nominated for the Dissertation Award of the German Informatics Society and named as one of the "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2023".