WSL Research Workshop, 15 – 16 December 2024

WSL Research Workshop in December 2024 will include a Fireside chat on 15 December, followed by a full-day workshop on 16 December.

Fireside chat | day1

Topic : Navigating Careers in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

From its early days as a concept to today’s sophisticated applications, the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the landscape of multiple industries including healthcare, technology, finance, marketing, agriculture, and education. AI is not only introducing extraordinary automation capabilities and efficiency, but also is influencing the skills required in the workforce. The evolving significance of AI has also resulted in professionals adapting to the changes due to the new technology. As AI continues to evolve and integrate into our day to day lives, it is essential to shed light on the advancements, develop relevant skills, and address the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in the modern workforce.

Join us for an insightful fireside chat on “Navigating Careers in the Age of AI”, where our distinguished experts will discuss how AI has progressed, and how this advancement has redefined and affected our learning and career paths. This event is for students, professionals, or anyone who is simply interested in the impact of AI.

We look forward to welcoming you to an evening of learning, discussion, and prepare for lifelong learning.

WSL Research Workshop | day 2

Web Science Lab (WSL), IIIT-B biannually conducts a research workshop, where WSL research scholars share the latest developments in their work and the knowledge and insights from it. The event encourages interactive discussions on the ongoing research problems and includes brainstorming sessions.

Schedule

Time	Title	Speaker
–	–	–

Speakers

Virginia Dignum

Prof. Virginia Dignum is a professor in Responsible Artificial Intelligence and the Director of the AI Policy Lab. Virginia is a member of the UN High Level Advisory Body on AI and senior advisor to the Wallenberg Foundations.

Her research focuses on the complex interconnections and interdependencies between people, organizations and technology. Her work ranges from the engineering of practical applications and simulations to the development of formal theories that integrate agency and organization, and includes a strong methodological design component.

Virginia is actively involved in several international initiatives on policy and strategy guidelines for AI research and applications. As such I am member of GPAI, the Global Partnership on AI, Dutch AI Alliance (ALLAI-NL), the World Economic Forum Council on AI, and the High-Level Expert Group on the Implementation of the UNESCO AI Ethics Recommendation. Previously she was member of European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, the Delft Design for Values Institute, the European Global Forum on AI (AI4People), the Responsible Robotics Foundation, the  and of the ADA-AI foundation. 

Virginia was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) in 2020, and in 2018 she was appointed Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). In 2006, she received the prestigious Veni grant from NWO (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research) for her work on computational agent-based organizational frameworks. She also associated with the Faculty Technology Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology.

Frank Dignum

Frank Dignum is a Professor, leading a research group in the field of socially conscious AI. Frank develops models that can provide insights into how society can respond to political changes or natural disasters.

He is leading a research group on socially aware AI that creates computational models of social aspects such as norms, values, practices, and conventions. These models can be used to create social simulations that are more realistic and give insights into how society will react to changes in policies and natural disasters, and also to create more natural dialogues with chatbots that can be used for training medical students to have conversations with patients.

Frank holds a Ph.D. in from the VU in Amsterdam. After working in Swaziland, Portugal and The Netherlands, he became Wallenberg chair in socially aware AI at Umeå University in 2019. Frank also has an affiliation with Utrecht University and is an honorary principal research fellow of the University of Melbourne.

Srinath Srinivasa

Prof. Srinath Srinivasa heads the Web Science lab and is the Dean (R&D) at the International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore (IIITB), India. Srinath holds a Ph.D (magna cum laude) from the Berlin Brandenburg Graduate School for Distributed Information Systems (GkVI) Germany, an M.S. (by Research) from Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IITM) and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) Mysore.

His research interests are in the area of Web Science– understanding how the WWW is affecting humanity; and how the web can enable social empowerment and capability building. Srinath has participated in several initiatives for technology enhanced education including the Edusat program by the Vishveshwaraiah Technological University, The National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a Switzerland based online MBA school called Educatis, and IIITB’s educational outreach program with Upgrad.  He has served on various technical and organizational committees for international conferences like International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), ACM Hypertext, International Conference on Management of Data and Data Science (COMAD/CoDS), International conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA), ACM Web Science, etc. As part of academic community outreach, Srinath has served on the Board of Studies of Goa University and as a member of the Academic Council of the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore. He has served as a technical reviewer for various journals like the VLDB journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He has also served as an Associate Editor of the journal Sadhana from the Indian Academy of Sciences. He is also the recipient of various national and international grants and awards, from foundations and companies like: EU Horizon 2020, UK Royal Academy of Engineering, Research Councils UK, MEITy, DST, Siemens, Intel, Mphasis, EMC and Gooru. Currently, Srinath also heads the AI initiative for the “Karnataka Data Lake” project by the Planning Dept of the Govt of Karnataka, to promote data and evidence-based planning and decision-making.

Sridhar Mandyam K

Sridhar is a Network Science researcher with experience of 30+ years as an IT/analytics professional in Research and Development in academics and industry. He is currently associated with Web Science Lab at IIIT-B as visiting faculty.

His current research is focused on models and approaches to study social learning and collective behavior in the world of social networks, and how businesses and other entities are seeking to reach and serve this vast virtual society. Research in these directions is aimed at developing an understanding of how network structure impacts opinion dynamics and the emergence of different types of group behaviors, and the possibilities for creation of solutions that yield economic or other benefits by engendering cooperative, collective choices. He has previously been with C-DAC, India’s national initiative in supercomputing, heading its systems software group. He has also been with IBM’s supercomputing division in the US, as part of the Technical Strategy and Architecture Group. He has also been an entrepreneur for over a decade, co-founding an R&D flavored analytics firm in the late ‘90s, which developed tools for identity data management.

Sridhar holds bachelors and masters degrees in Physics from IIT Kharagpur and IIT Madras respectively, an M.Tech in Physical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and Ph.D degree the in the area of parallel computing from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IISc, Bangalore, India. He has also held several visiting positions at research establishments in India and overseas, including the, the Department of Electrical Engineering at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, the Department of Computer Science, as an invited scholar at University of Texas at Austin under the Fulbright Program of the US, and at the Center for Information-Enhanced Medicine (CiEMED), Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore.