issues and experts

SFU experts take centre stage at Vancouver’s leading AI conference: NeurIPS 2024

December 12, 2024

NeurIPS, one of the leading conferences in machine learning and artificial intelligence research, is currently underway at the Vancouver Convention Centre, running until Sunday, Dec. 15.

Several SFU faculty members and experts are attending the event, presenting papers and demonstrating their groundbreaking work, spanning areas such as visual computing, language processing, reinforcement learning, and beyond.

AVAILABLE SFU EXPERTS

STEVE DIPAOLA, professor and graduate program chair, school of interactive arts and technology
sdipaola@sfu.ca
Expertise: Artificial Intelligence, AI ethics, AI for social good, AI bots and character agents, AI and art, digital fine art, virtual reality and augmented reality, digital art, virtual agents.

Examples of Steve’s art and video work using AI can be seen on his Facebook page.

ANGELICA LIM, assistant professor, computing science
angelica@sfu.ca
Expertise: Human robot interaction, affective computing, multimodal perception and learning, developmental robotics.

Angelica presented at the conference on Tuesday, on the following topic:

Multimodal Machine Learning for Interactive Embodied AI 
Science fiction has long promised us interactive AI and robots that interact with us as smoothly as humans do - Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons, C-3PO from Star Wars, and Samantha from Her. Today, interactive voice interfaces are moving us closer to effortless, human-like interactions in the real world. In her talk, Angelica discussed the opportunities and challenges in moving past linguistic interactions. How can we analyze, detect and generate nonverbal, multimodal communication in context, including prosody, gestures, gaze, auditory signals, and facial expressions? Specifically, she examined how we might allow embodied AI agents to understand human social signals (including emotions, mental states, and attitudes) across cultures as well as recognize and generate expressions with controllability, transparency, and diversity in mind.

NICHOLAS VINCENT, assistant professor, computing science
nicholas_vincent@sfu.ca
Expertise: human centered machine learning, responsible AI, human computer interaction, economic impacts.

Nicholas is an advisor for a workshop on Creativity & Generative AI, taking place on Saturday, Dec. 14. This workshop is a dialogue between machine learning researchers and creative professionals. In the wake of a disruptive year of advances in generative AI, it will bring together the two communities for much-needed conversation.

CONTACT

WILL HENDERSON, SFU Communications & Marketing 
604.368.2532 | will_henderson@sfu.ca

MATT KIELTYKA, SFU Communications & Marketing 
236.880.2187 | matt_kieltyka@sfu.ca

Simon Fraser University
Communications & Marketing |  SFU Media Experts Directory
778.782.3210

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