Pascale Fung
Generative models for Conversational AI are less than a decade old, but they hold great promise for human-machine interactions. Machine responses based on generative models can seem quite fluent and human-like, empathetic and funny, knowledgeable and professional. However, behind the confident voice of generative ConvAI systems, they can also be hallucinating misinformation, giving biased and harmful views, and are still not "safe" enough for many real life applications. The expressive power of generative ConvAI models and their undesirable behavior are two sides of the same coin. How can we harness the fluency, diversity, engagingness of generative ConvAI models while mitigating the downside? In this talk, I will present some of our team’s recent work in making generative ConvAI safer via mitigating hallucinations, misinformation, and toxicity.
Pascale Fung is a Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her "significant contributions to the field of conversational AI and to the development of ethical AI principles and algorithms", an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE). She was the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.
