CDT Pizza 16/11

Talk #1

Speaker

Paul Micaelli

Title

The Dark side of Academia: Manipulation, Ideological Bias and Hypersensitivity.

Abstract

In the age of Brexit, Trump and European nationalism it should strike you that the largely liberal mindset of academia has not won many battles. Why? Are we too righteous to be understood by the fools? No. We have a dark side: most published research is wrong, we have traded diversity of opinions for diversity of everything else, and we are too hypersensitive to receive criticism. This talk is not PC and may antagonize you

Talk #2

Speaker

Alex Lascarides

Title

Programming by Discussion

Abstract

I will present some work I've been doing that contributes towards a novel learning paradigm that we call Programming by Discussion. The aim is for an agent to learn optimal policies, via a combination of trial and error and an extended embodied conversation with a domain expert. Crucially, the agent starts out unaware of factors that are critical to solving its task: i.e., there are unknown unknowns, not just known unknowns.

To discover and then learn to exploit these relevant but unforeseen factors, the agent combines learning how to interpret the expert's signals--even though it includes unknown words (i.e., neologisms) that denote concepts that are not a part of the agent's domain model---with learning from the observed consequences (and rewards) of its actions in the domain. This is joint work with Mattias Appelgren, Yordan Hristov, Craig Innes and Ram Ramamoorthy.