2022 UQ Workshop on Artificial Intelligence

12 December 2022

Highlights from the 2022 UQ Workshop on Artificial Intelligence

On 31^st October and 1^st November, the University of Queensland (UQ) artificial intelligence (AI) research community gathered for a 2-day workshop on AI. The Workshop began with a warm welcome by the Director of the UQ AI Collaboratory, Professor Shazia Sadiq, and the UQ Deputy Vice Chancellor Research, Professor Mark Blows. It proceeded with a keynote talk by Associate Professor Marcus Gallagher and Dr. Archie Chapman, co-chairs of the event, in review of a year of AI development in 2022. Five sessions of fundamental and applied AI research were presented with an addition of more than a dozen poster presentations. The Workshop concluded with an interdisciplinary panel discussion among Professor Janet Wiles (Computer Scientist & expert in Social Robotics), Dr. Ian Wood (Statistician), Professor Paul Henman (Social Scientist), who were joined by A/Prof. Marcus Gallagher (Computer Scientist) and the audience in person and online.

The Workshop attracted over 200 registration and over 100 attendees in person. It also received 36 submissions of research presentations from across UQ schools and faculties, including Schools of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering (Faculty of Engineering, Architecture, and Information Technology), School of Mathematics and Physics and School of Chemistry & Molecular Sciences (Faculty of Science), School of Law (Faculty of Business, Economics, and Law), School of Psychology (Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences), as well as the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES).

The key themes discussed by the panel were Responsible AI; adoption and trust of AI systems, and; ethics and the nature of knowledge in the context of artificially-generated text and works of art.

This event was supported by the UQ AI Collaboratory and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, which sponsored the following awards.

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Award, received by Vladimir Morozov for his talk “Predicting toxicity of a protein from its primary sequence”.
UQ AI Collaboratory Award, received by Dr. Benjamin Pope for his talk “Astronomical imaging and hardware design with differentiable optical models”.
UQ AI Collaboratory Award runner up, Dr. Michael Noetel for his talk “What psychological biases make it hard to work on AI alignment, robustness, and interpretability”.
People’s Choice Award, received by Ms. Laurensia Andrini for her poster presentation “Protecting AI-generated works in Indonesia: compatibility with copyright law”.
People’s Choice Award runner up, Ms. Yunzhuo Zhou for her talk “DDMut: predicting mutation effects on protein stability using deep learning”.