Tuesday, Oct 1st 2024

Professor Genevieve Bell
Vice-Chancellor and President ANU

Keynote Title and Abstract

Messages Passed Through

Australia's Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) from Darwin to Adelaide was a staggering engineering feat and crucial system of the late nineteenth-century. Interwoven with other human, technical, and ecological systems, the OTL transformed our experiences of time, distance, knowledge, and social relationships. In these ways, the various cultural experiences and impacts of the OTL are quite similar to our current understandings of and relationships with mobile technologies - in Australia and across the globe. In this talk Genevieve will explore these connections between historical large-scale systems like the OTL and modern technological advancements, including mobile technologies, and what critical learnings we can draw from them.

Speaker Bio

The Vice-Chancellor provides executive leadership to the University and takes overall responsibility for delivering the ANU Strategy. She chairs key management committees including the University Senior Management Group and the ANU Executive, and is also a member of the ANU governing body, the Council. The Vice-Chancellor is the University's primary representative to government and wider society, and to national and international organisations.

Genevieve Bell was appointed the 13th Vice-Chancellor of ANU in January 2024. Genevieve is the University's first female Vice-Chancellor.

Genevieve holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and is a renowned anthropologist, technologist, and futurist, having spent more than two decades in Silicon Valley helping guide Intel's product development and social science and design research capabilities. She is best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technology development and for being an important voice in the global debates around artificial intelligence and human society.

In 2017, Genevieve returned to Australia and established the 3A Institute at ANU, in collaboration with CSIRO's Data61, with the mission of building a new branch of engineering to take AI-enabled cyber-physical systems safely, sustainably and responsibly scale. In 2021, she became the inaugural Director of the new ANU School of Cybernetics, which builds on the foundational work of the 3A Institute and seeks to establish cybernetics as an important tool for navigating major societal transformations, through capability building, policy development and safe, sustainable and responsible approaches to new systems.

In addition to her roles at the ANU and Intel, Genevieve was also a Non-Executive Director of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia Board (January 2019-October 2023) and is currently a Member of the Prime Minister's National Science and Technology Council, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), Florence Violet McKenzie Chair, SRI International Engelbart Distinguished Fellow, member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) AI Council and an Officer of the Order of Australia.

Wednesday, Oct 2nd 2024

Professor Thad Starner
Georgia Tech

Keynote Title and Abstract

Mobile Sign Language Recognition: Creating Useful and Usable Interfaces for the Deaf

The Oscar best picture winning movie CODA has helped introduce Deaf culture to many in the hearing community. The capital "D" in Deaf is used when referring to the Deaf culture, whereas small "d" deaf refers to the medical condition. In the Deaf community, sign language is used to communicate, and sign has a rich history in film, the arts, and education. Learning about the Deaf culture in the United States and the importance of American Sign Language in that culture has been key to choosing projects that are useful and usable for the Deaf. This talk will review 30 years of effort in sign language recognition and working with the Deaf community and will feature several upcoming products such as PopSignAI, a smartphone game that helps hearing parents of Deaf infants learn sign language.

Speaker Bio

Thad Starner is a Georgia Tech Professor and a wearable computing pioneer. In 1990, Starner coined the term "augmented reality" to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned for the future. In 1997, Thad was a founder of the annual ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), now in its 28th year. From 2010-2018 Dr. Starner was a Technical Lead on Google's Glass, which was named a "50 Most Influential Gadget of All Time" by Time Magazine. Professor Starner has been inducted into the CHI Academy in 2017 and AWE's XR Hall of Fame in 2024. He has over 100 issued United States utility patents on wearables, artificial intelligence and interfaces.

Thursday, Oct 3rd 2024

Professor Dr. Paul Lukowicz
DFKI Kaiserslautern

Keynote Title and Abstract

Generative AI for Seamless Any Time Any Place Wearable Interaction

Since nearly three decades, Wearable Computing has been pursuing the vision of any time any place context aware personal assistance. No matter what you do and where you are, the system should be able to automatically recognize what you need and autonomously take appropriate action. Countless systems have since then been published demonstrating divers variants of this vision: from memory augmentation for every day conversations through healthy lifestyle assistance, to production/maintenance support. The vast majority of them have two things in common: “any time any place” in reality means “in my constrained lab setting” and “ no matter what you do” means “as long as you do one of the narrowly defined actions I have trained my system to deal with”. The problem is the incompatibility of the established paradigm for AI system development: “supervised training on data representative of every possible situation the system may encounter”, with the diversity and unpredictability of the real world. As a consequence wearable assistants have so far had little impact in the real world. The talk will discuss how the emergence of Generative AI (LLMs, VLLMs and foundational models in general) can solve that problem finally, after 30 years of unfulfilled promises, facilitate the vision of “universal” wearable assistants. At the core of our approach is the notion of foundational models as noisy but extremely comprehensive world models that can be flexibly accessed through dense vector spaces linking various input/sensing modalities.

Speaker Bio

Prof. Dr. Paul Lukowicz is a Full Professor of AI at the RPTU in Kaiserslautern, Germany and at the same time is Scientific Director at DFKI Kaiserslautern, where he heads the Embedded Intelligence group. Previous positions include Full Professor of Embedded Systems at the University of Passau, Germany, and Full Professor in the Computer Engineering Dept. at the University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Innsbruck, Austria. His research focuses on context-aware ubiquitous and wearable systems, quantum computing, and human-AI interaction, including sensing, machine learning, system architectures, large-scale to-edge systems, and applications. Currently Paul Lukowicz is running a wide range of German national and EU projects. He is the Coordinator of the HumanE AI-Net, a large networking project with more than 50 European partners, and acts as Editor for various scientific publications. He has served on more than 50 program committees (including TPC Chair) at high-quality international conferences of all the main conferences within his research area.