Keynotes

Aligning AI with human preferences and values

Machines are doing a better and better job optimizing specified objectives or loss functions. But what objectives should they optimize for? ChatGPT mainly optimizes for predicting what word comes next from a corpus of text on the internet, and that has all sorts of unintended consequences, from making stuff up to telling a user they are a bad person and don’t deserve to live. Autonomous cars need to optimize for safety, efficiency, comfort, and abiding by road rules, but what happens as those things start coming into conflict? Recommendation systems optimize for getting clicks and engagement, but that leads to a lot of wasted time and even polarization, which is a far cry from increasing our happiness and giving us what we value. It is really not surprising that we have a hard time specifying objectives that spell out what we actually want and that is getting us into trouble with AI — after all, we have so many legends and stories about how we need to be careful what we wish for. King Mindas wished that everything he touched would turn to gold (not what he actually wanted, it turned out); genies and goldfish grant 3 wishes, with the last one inevitably being “please undo the previous two”! In this talk, we will go over the challenge of specifying and tuning objective functions for AI, and explore how machines might be able to learn what people want through interaction — to listen to what people say, look at what they do, as questions, and ever-evolve their understanding of us, humans.

Biography

Anca Dragan is an associate professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her goal is to enable robots (and AI agents more broadly) to work for and around people. She runs the InterACT laboratory, where she focuses on algorithmic human-robot interaction: algorithms that move beyond the robot’s function in isolation and generate robot behavior that coordinates well with human actions and is aligned with what humans actually want the robot to do. Anca received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. She helped found the Berkeley AI Research Laboratory, and is co-principal investigator of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. She has been honored by the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), NSF CAREER, Sloan, Okawa, ONR Young Investigator Award, MIT TR35, and the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award.

GPT under the hood. Which layer is the Artificial General Intelligence?

Biography

Yannic Kilcher is the CTO of DeepJudge an ETH spin-off and legal tech start-up. He has a PhD in Machine Learning and runs one of the largest YouTube channels on Machine Learning research.

Leave a Mark! – Disruptive Innovation in the third millennium

What are the traits of those who leave a mark behind? What do they do differently that make people remember them so well? Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor, said once: People will forget what you said or did, but they will never forget how you let them feel.

It’s all about creating an experience, breaking the rules and making it your own. Leaving a mark is definitely not about security. It is not about avoiding mistakes. It’s about how we act on the spot and solve problems online. It’s about the courage to be disruptive and create meaningful surprises while keeping passion and curiosity as our inner drive.

Professional stage performers and musicians are constantly coping with variety of dilemmas and leading tasks: stage fright and black outs, forming and conducting concerts, founding ensembles, leading events, branding and marketing themselves, speaking and playing in public and many other challenges. Could they give valuable insights to other disciplines that need to demonstrate leadership What’s in their thinking and action that can reflect new visions on powerful influence?

It is this talk that enables one to find his/her personal stamp while having the tools to project a given talent. It will be governed by three principles: Experience, Learning and Implementation. Orit Wolf (Ph.D.), next to her piano, will allow practical and fascinating tools to change mindsets in every profession and learn how to leave a mark. Being both an international concert pianist, as well as a leading mentor and lecturer on Innovation and Leadership, made her a strong figure in bringing both individuals and organizations to make a powerful stamp.

Biography

Named one of the most influential personalities of the year in 2010 by Israel’s financial magazine THE MARKER, Dr. Orit Wolf has been disrupting the corporate world by inspiring business leaders and managers to Leave Your Personal Mark.

Dividing her time between a busy concert and performance career, lecturing around the world, and guiding major corporations and management on impactful leadership, Wolf is a sought-after consultant for many international Fortune 500 firms. Among the clients Wolf has worked with are IBM, ZIM, MasterCard, Visa, Motorola, NDS, Cisco, Veraz, HP, Halma, Teva, FERRING, ECI, Ely Lilly, EDS, FedEx, Flying Cargo, Verint, Orange, Team, Matrix, DELL, IDI Insurance and Strauss.

Wolf’s recent TED Talk: Play the Keynote of your Life, has been widely viewed as ground-breaking in the field of music, disruption and innovative thinking.

Wolf teaches How to Leave Your Mark at Herzliya’s IDC University Arison Business School and lectures in Leadership for Stage Performers at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She has taught Master Classes and given guest lectures on Music and Management, Creative Marketing and Interpersonal Communication at University programs around the world. Her advanced education at Tel Aviv University, Boston University and the Royal Academy of Music (all by the age of 23) has led to winning numerous international awards, including the Kahn Award for the Arts, the Richmond
Competition, BBC Radio 3, Hattori Foundation and America Israel Cultural Foundation prizes.

Among her many accolades, Wolf was the recipient of the Rosenblum Prize from the Tel Aviv Municipality in 2019 for her outstanding musical achievements. In 2022 she was appointed “Artist in Residence” by the Technion: one of Israel’s highest institutes for Science: She is currently authoring the book “The Language of the Creative Mind”.