CS Colloquium

Recent advances in the democratization of AI have been enabling the widespread use of generative models, causing the exponential rise of fake content. Nudification of over 680.000 women by a social bot, impersonation scams worth millions of dollars, or spreading political misinformation through synthetic politicians are just the footfall of the deep fake dystopia. 

As every technology is simultaneously built with its counterpart to neutralize it, this is the perfect time to fortify our eyes with deep fake detectors. Deep fakes depend on photorealism to disable our natural detectors: we cannot simply look at a video to decide if it is real. On the other hand, this realism is not preserved in physiological, biological, and physical signals of deep fakes, yet. In this talk, I will begin with presenting our renowned FakeCatcher, which detects synthetic content in portrait videos using heart beats, as a preventive solution for the emerging threat of deep fakes. Detectors blindly utilizing deep learning are not as effective in catching fake content, as generative models keep producing formidably realistic results. My key assertion follows that such signals hidden in portrait videos can be used as an implicit descriptor of authenticity, like a generalizable watermark of humans, because they are neither spatially nor temporally preserved in deep fakes. Building robust and accurate deep detectors by exhaustively analyzing heartbeats, PPG signals, eye vergence, and gaze movements of deep fake actors reinforce our perception of reality. 

Moreover, we also innovate novel models to detect the source generator of any deep fake by exploiting its heart beats to unveil residuals of different generative models. Achieving leading results over both existing datasets and our recently introduced in-the-wild dataset justifies our approaches and pioneers a new dimension in deep fake research.

These days Cloud Services go way beyond online storage services. Major players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer a smorgasbord of online Cloud Services ranging from simple cloud storage solutions to software as a service, hardware as a service, and even whole computing infrastructures as a service. In this talk, I will demonstrate how all of the above can be achieved even on any half-way modern laptop. It will be limited in performance but not in the scope of services provisioned. This can be achieved entirely with free software. The talk will provide a step-by-step life demonstration of creating a complete computing infrastructure consisting of different operating systems and servers.

The nexus of advances in robotics, NLU, and machine learning has created opportunities for personalized robots. The current pandemic has both caused and exposed unprecedented levels of health & wellness, education, and training needs worldwide.   Socially assistive robotics has the potential to address those and longer-standing care needs through personalized and affordable support that complements human care.
 
This talk will discuss human-robot interaction methods for socially assistive robotics that utilize multi-modal interaction data and expressive and persuasive robot behavior to monitor, coach, and motivate users to engage in health, wellness, education  and training activities. Methods and results will be presented that include modeling, learning, and personalizing user motivation, engagement, and coaching of healthy children and adults, stroke patients, Alzheimer's patients, and children with autism spectrum disorders, in short and long-term (month+) deployments in schools, therapy centers, and homes. Research and commercial implications and pathways will be discussed.

In the first part we cover five current specific problems that motivate the needs of responsible AI: (1) discrimination (e.g., facial recognition, justice, sharing economy, language models); (2) phrenology (e.g., biometric based predictions); (3) unfair digital commerce (e.g., exposure and popularity bias); (4) stupid models (e.g., minimal adversarial AI) and (5) indiscriminate use of computing resources (e.g., large language models). These examples do have a personal bias but set the context for the second part where we address four challenges: (1) too many principles (e.g., principles vs. techniques), (2) cultural differences; (3) regulation and (4) our cognitive biases. We finish discussing what we can do to address these challenges in the near future to be able to develop responsible AI, particularly under the umbrella of the incoming regulation (European Union's AI Act & White House's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights)

The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage drafted 26 code fragments between 1836 and 1840 for his unfinished “Analytical Engine.” The programs were embedded implicitly in tables representing execution traces. In this talk, we explore the programming architecture of Babbage’s mechanical computer, that is, its structure from the point of view of a programmer, based on those 26 coding examples preserved in the Babbage Papers Archive. I will also show the world's "first computer program". The programs illustrate how Babbage intended to build the Analytical Engine and its capabilities.

Bio: Dr. Raúl Rojas is a professor of Statistics in the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics at UNR. Previously, he was a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Universities of Berlin, Vienna, and Halle-Wittenberg. His field of research is the theory and applications of AI. He has written three books about the history of computing. For his research in this area, especially the reconstruction of historical machines, he received the Tony Sale Award from the British Computer Society in 2015 and the Wolfgang von Kempelen Prize from the Austrian Computer Society in 2005.