AI for Social Good

Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AI.R), NTU, in collaboration with NTU Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity (NISTH), is organising a virtual AI+X Symposium on “AI for Social Good” on 17 November 2020, Tuesday, 2pm-5:30pm.

Artificial intelligence has significant potential to intervene in some of humanity’s most pressing and challenging problems. As AI systems become more powerful and flexible they have been applied to helping refugees, healthcare, environmental monitoring, assisting those with disabilities, and a range of other humanitarians and societal. As AI is deployed in these arenas, it is important to apply our understanding of ethics in considering how these systems are designed and used. “AI for social good” involves investigations of how to best assist, empower, and improve societies and individuals through AI. The symposium will bring together researchers who are working at the forefront of pushing AI into domains where it can do “social good” with scholars who are reflecting on its broader social and ethical impacts.

Event Schedule:

Time Subject Speaker
2.05 PM – 2.40 PM KEYNOTE
Using AI to Improve the Lives of Underserved Billions
Dr Padmanabhan Anandan,
Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence
2.40 PM – 3.15 PM KEYNOTE
Opportunities for AI in the Development of Autonomous
Water Purification Systems
Prof Shane Allen Snyder,
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
3.15PM – 3.40PM AI for Human-Environment Interactions Asst. Prof Lee Ser Huay Janice Teresa, 
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
3.50PM – 4.15PM Designing AI to Stop Disability Bias Prof Gerard Goggin, 
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
4.15PM – 4.40PM Automating Aviation & Healthcare: Two Industries Showing
the Promise & Perils of AI
Asst. Prof Andrew Prahl,
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
4.40PM -5.05PM Medical AI in Hepatology: Two Live Projects Dr. Melvin Chen and Dr. Wei Liang,
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
5.05PM -5.30PM AI for Elderly Care: Interpretable & Generalizable Feature
Learning for Human Activity Recognition with Edge Devices
Dr. Qian Hangwei, 
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Speaker Biography

Dr. Padmanabhan Anandan has been the CEO of Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence since its inception in Feb 2018. Previous to this Anandan was VP for Research at the Adobe Research Lab India (2016-2017) and before that a Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director at Microsoft Research (1997-2014). Anandan was the founding director of Microsoft Research India which he ran from 2005-2014. Prior to this, Anandan was researcher at Sarnoff corporation (1991-1997) and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Yale University (1987-1991). His primary research area is Computer vision where he is well known for his fundamental and lasting contributions to the problem of visual motion analysis.
Anandan received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, a Masters in Computer Science from University of Nebraska, Lincoln in 1979 and his BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, India in 1977. He is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras, and UMass, Amherst and is on the Nebraska Hall of Computing.

Dr. Shane Snyder is a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and is the Executive Director of the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He joined NTU after serving as a Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering and the co-Director of the Water & Energy Sustainable Technology (WEST) Center at the University of Arizona, USA. Dr. Snyder has also worked as a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (2011-2017). For over 20 years, Dr. Snyder’s research has focused on the identification, fate, and health relevance of emerging water pollutants. Dr. Snyder and his teams have published over 250 manuscripts and book chapters on emerging contaminant analysis, treatment, and toxicology, which have resulted in over 25,000 citations. He currently serves as the Editor in Chief for the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology Water, and previously served as an editor-in-chief for the Elsevier journal Chemosphere. Dr. Snyder is a Fellow of the International Water Association and a member of the World Health Organization’s Drinking Water Advisory Panel. The Water Research Foundation awarded the 2015 Dr. Pankaj Parekh Research Innovation Award to Prof Snyder. In 2017, Dr Snyder received the Agilent Thought Leader Award in recognition of leadership in water sustainability, safety, and treatment. He and his team were also awarded the Nanyang Humanitarian Award from NTU Singapore in 2018 for their philanthropic work in water and sanitation, which has benefited over two million people in underserved communities in Asia.

Asst Prof Lee Ser Huay, obtained her PhD degree from ETH Zurich, and was a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Mobility Postdoc at the Princeton University’s Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP). Her research interests include investigating the drivers of pertinent land-use and land-cover change in the tropics, evaluating management strategies for tropical forest-agricultural landscapes and understanding the effects of environmental changes on food security.

Professor Gerard Goggin is the Wee Kim Wee Chair in Communication Studies. He is an internationally renowned scholar in communication, cultural, and media studies, whose pioneering research on the cultural and social dynamics of digital technology has been widely influential.Professor Goggin has made benchmark contributions to the understanding of mobile communication, international Internets and their histories, with key books such as Cell Phone Culture (2006) and Global Mobile Media (2011). Professor Goggin also is a world-leading researcher in the area of accessibility and digital technology, especially relating to the cutting-edge area of disability. After publishing the first international study Digital Disability in 2003, he has undertaken a wide range of research on Internet and digital technology accessibility. Over his career Professor Goggin has published twenty-three books and written over 190 journal articles and book chapters. He has a strong record of attracting grants receiving more than A$4 million in research funding. Professor Goggin has had a longstanding engagement in communications, technology, and social policy. Most recently in 2018 he was the Chair of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel of the inaugural Australian Research Council Engagement & Impact assessment. In recognition of his contributions to the study of communication, Professor Goggin was made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Fellow of the International Communication Association. Currently he serves as Secretary-General of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

Dr Andrew Prahl’s research investigates the impact of automation on society. Research projects include understanding the effects of replacing human advisors with algorithmic advisors, how artificial intelligence is affecting industries, and how technology is changing the relationship between patient and provider in healthcare.

Dr. Melvin Chen is a philosopher at NTU whose research interests include the following: the philosophy of AI, causal epistemology, the philosophy of imagination, creative cognition research, aesthetics, metaethics and normative ethics, and philosophy and literature. Melvin is also currently serving as the PI of a project entitled ‘A Tale of Two Deficits: Causality & Care in Medical AI’. This project, generously funded by the NTU Accelerating Creativity & Excellence grant scheme, is an interdisciplinary collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Chew Lock Yue (Co-I, SPMS), Dr. Quek Wei Liang (Research Fellow, SPMS), Haroun Chahed (Project Officer), and Suryadi (PhD candidate, SPMS). The team is working on the design of a causal inference algorithm in a medical context.

Dr. Wei Liang joined the School of Humanities in Nanyang Technological University as a Research Fellow in 2019. He received his BSc degree and his Ph.D in Physics from the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in Nanyang Technological University. His primary research interest lies primarily in applying modeling and data analysis approaches in a wide range of complex systems such as vehicular traffic flow and medical epistemology. Currently, he am involved in developing a clinical support tool based on the pathological causal structure inferred from medical data.

Dr. Qian Hangwei is currently a Wallenberg-NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in LILY Research Center at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She obtained a Ph.D. in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at NTU in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Sinno Jialin Pan and B.Eng. from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2015. Her research interests are kernel methods, transfer learning, and applications to human activity recognition. She has published three top-tier conference papers on IJCAI and AAAI, all of which are selected as oral presentations.

Event Details
Date and Time
17 Nov 2020 (Tue)
2:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Venue
Online)
Event Format