Cray Distinguished Speaker Series with Jeannette Wing, presenting "Trustworthy AI"

About

Each year our colleagues at The Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) hold the Cray Distinguished Speaker Series, bringing in visitors to CS&E. 

On November 25, speaker, Jeannette Wing (Columbia University), will be giving a talk titled "Trustworthy AI."

Abstract

Recent years have seen an astounding growth in deployment of AI systems in critical domains such as autonomous vehicles, criminal justice, and healthcare, where decisions taken by AI agents directly impact human lives. Consequently, there is an increasing concern if these decisions can be trusted.  How can we deliver on the promise of the benefits of AI but address scenarios that have life-critical consequences for people and society?  In short, how can we achieve trustworthy AI? 

Under the umbrella of trustworthy computing, employing formal methods for ensuring trust properties such as reliability and security has led to scalable success.  Just as for trustworthy computing, formal methods could be an effective approach for building trust in AI-based systems.  However, we would need to extend the set of properties to include fairness, robustness, and interpretability, etc.; and to develop new verification techniques to handle new kinds of artifacts, e.g., data distributions and machine-learned models. This talk poses a new research agenda, from a formal methods perspective, for us to increase trust in AI systems.

Biography

Jeannette M. Wing is the Executive Vice President for Research and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She joined Columbia in 2017 as the inaugural Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute. From 2013 to 2017, she was a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research.  She is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon where she twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department and had been on the faculty since 1985. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.  She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds an honorary doctorate of technology from Linkoping University, Sweden.

Professor Wing's current research focus is on trustworthy AI.  Her general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, security and privacy, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. She is known for her work on linearizability, behavioral subtyping, attack graphs, and privacy-compliance checkers. Her 2006 seminal essay, titled "Computational Thinking," is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced.

She is currently a member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences Board of Directors and Council; Computing Research Association Board; American Association of Universities, Senior Research Officers Steering Committee; the Advisory Board for the Association for Women in Mathematics; the Chan-Zuckerberg New York Biohub Steering Committee; and the Empire AI, Inc. Board of Directors. She has been chair and/or a member of many other academic, government, industry, and professional society advisory boards.  She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM, the Communications of the ACM, and the Harvard Data Science Review. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2014. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and National Academy of Innovators.  She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the MIT Corporation.