Trustworthy Generative AI
Generative AI has taken the world by storm and is impacting numerous application areas ranging from music and art to engineering design and scientific discovery. In this talk, we will first present several examples of generative AI technology and deployment, such as knowledge-based approaches going back to Chef Watson and statistical approaches including large language models. Then we discuss desiderata and public policy around generative AI, including recent efforts in industry and the U.S. federal government. Finally, we will detail a new approach to generative AI called information lattice learning that reifies many of the desiderata and policy objectives, achieving state-of-the-art performance in knowledge discovery, semantic compression, visual classification, and creativity/generation, while being very data-efficient, compute-efficient, human-controllable, and IP liability free.
Speaker Biography
Lav Varshney is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company using novel human-integrated artificial intelligence (AI) in social music co-creativity platforms to enhance human wellbeing across society, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment. He also holds affiliations with RAND Corporation and with Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is a former White House staffer in the U.S. government, having recently served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national and international AI and wireless communications policy. Previously at IBM Research, he led the development and deployment of the Chef Watson system for culinary creativity as the first commercially successful generative AI technology, which also received worldwide acclaim. At Salesforce Research, he was part of the team that open-weight released the largest and most capable large language model at the time. His work and public scholarship has been featured in media ranging from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, national public radio, Slate, and The New Yorker. He appeared in the Robert Downey, Jr. documentary series, Age of AI. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research interests include information theory; artificial intelligence foundations, explainability, and governance; agent-based policymaking; creativity and innovation; and AI applications in health and wellbeing.
