A culture of open and reproducible research, in the era of large AI generative models

Joelle Pineau - McGill SOCS

Jan. 19, 2024, 2:30 p.m. - Jan. 19, 2024, 3:30 p.m.

*Macdonald* Engineering Building, Room 276

Hosted by: Dave Meger


We have seen in the last year an incredible pace of progress in large AI
models, with increasing abilities to generate high quality images,
videos, text, sound and more.  The best of these models display signs of
creativity, reasoning, generalization and plasticity beyond what we
could imagine just a few years ago.  Yet many challenges and open
questions remain, both on the technological aspects and the societal
impact of these models.  Further progress, especially on mitigating the
social risks of these models, is hampered by a lack of transparency and
reproducibility. In this talk I will describe ongoing efforts to
increase best practices towards the responsible training and deployment
of AI research systems, drawing on our experience with the ML
reproducibility program, and the recent release of several

state-of-the-art large models.

Joelle Pineau is a Professor and William Dawson Scholar at the School of Computer Science at McGill University, where she co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. She is a core academic member of Mila and a Canada CIFAR AI chairholder. She is also a VP, AI research at Meta (previously Facebook), where she leads the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team. She holds a BASc in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an MSc and PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Pineau's research focuses on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex partially-observable domains. She also works on applying these algorithms to complex problems in robotics, health care, games and conversational agents. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and is Past-President of the International Machine Learning Society. She is a recipient of NSERC's E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2018), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists by the Royal Society of Canada, and a 2019 recipient of the Governor General's Innovation Awards.