humanities-centered ai

Starting from a formalization of the main research goals of artificial intelligence (AI) using information and probability theory, the talk will show how our research on (dynamic and causal) probabilistic relational models, combined with pretrained embedding-based models, can contribute to the design of agents that (i) can handle non-trivial task descriptions and (ii) can appropriately interact with humans (and other agents) in so-called social mechanisms. With social mechanisms as a central topic of humanities-centered AI, the talk also tries to shed light on where and how AI regulation can be sensibly applied in the future.

Bio

Ralf Möller is Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Humanities and heads the Institute of Humanities-Centered AI (CHAI) at the Universität Hamburg. His main research area is artificial intelligence, in particular probabilistic relational modeling techniques and natural language technologies for information systems as well as machine learning and data mining for decision making of agents in social mechanisms. Ralf Möller is co-speaker of the Section for Artificial Intelligence of the German Informatics Society. He is also an affiliated professor at DFKI zu Lübeck, a branch of Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligence with several sites in Germany. DFKI is responsible for technology transfer of AI research results into industry and society.

Before joining the Universität Hamburg in 2024, Ralf Möller was Full Professor for Computer Science and headed the Institute of Information Systems at Universität zu Lübeck. In Lübeck he was also the head of the research department Stochastic Relational AI in Heathcare at DFKI. In his earlier carrier, Ralf Möller also was Associate Professor for Computer Science at Hamburg University of Technology from 2003 to 2014. From 2001 to 2003 he was Professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Wedel/Germany. In 1996 he received the degree Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Hamburg and successfully submitted his Habilitation thesis in 2001 also at the University of Hamburg.

Professor Möller was co-organizer of several national and international workshops on humanities-centered AI as well as on description logics. He also was co-organizer of the European Lisp Symposium 2011. In 2019, he co-chaired the organization of the International Conference on Big Knowledge ICBK19 in Beijing, and he is co-organizing the conference "Artificial Intelligence" KI2021 in Berlin with colleagues Stefan Edelkamp and Elmar Rueckert. Prof. Möller was an Associate Editor for the Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems, member of the Editorial Board of the Journal on Big Data Research, as well as Mathematical Reviews/MathSciNet Reviewer.

Institution

• CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Machine learning (ML) models trained on code are increasingly integrated into various software engineering tasks. While they generally demonstrate promising performance, many aspects of their capabilities remain unclear. Specifically, there is a lack of understanding regarding what these models learn, why they learn it, how they operate, and when they produce erroneous outputs.

In this talk, I will present findings from a series of studies that (i) examine the abilities of these models to complement human developers, (ii) explore the syntax and representation learning capabilities of ML models designed for software maintenance tasks, and (iii) investigate the patterns of bugs these models exhibit. Additionally, I will discuss a novel self-refinement approach aimed at enhancing the reliability of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). This method focuses on reducing the occurrence of bugs before execution, autonomously and without the need for human intervention or predefined test cases.

Bio:
Foutse Khomh is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal,  a Canada Research Chair Tier 1 on Trustworthy Intelligent Software Systems, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair on Trustworthy Machine Learning Software Systems, an NSERC Arthur B. McDonald Fellow, an Honoris Genius Prize Laureate, and an FRQ-IVADO Research Chair on Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Applications. He received a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Montreal in 2011, with the Award of Excellence. He also received a CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize for 2019. His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, machine learning systems engineering, cloud engineering, and dependable and trustworthy ML/AI. His work has received four ten-year Most Influential Paper (MIP) Awards, six Best/Distinguished Paper Awards at major conferences, and two Best Journal Paper of the Year Awards. He initiated and co-organized the Software Engineering for Machine Learning Applications (SEMLA) symposium and the RELENG (Release Engineering) workshop series. He is co-founder of the NSERC CREATE SE4AI: A Training Program on the Development, Deployment, and Servicing of Artificial Intelligence-based Software Systems and one of the Principal Investigators of the DEpendable Explainable Learning (DEEL) project. He is also a co-founder of Quebec's initiative on Trustworthy AI (Confiance IA Quebec) and Scientific co-director of the Institut de Valorisation des Données (IVADO). He is on the editorial board of multiple international software engineering journals (e.g., IEEE Software, EMSE, SQJ, JSEP) and is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Institution

• CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security