Broad agenda as below (subject to changes). More details will be updated soon.
Thursday, 24th January 2019
09:00 – 09:30 Registration
09:30 – 10:15 Welcome session
10:15 – 11:15 Plenary Talk: Raghu Ramakrishnan (opens in new tab) , CTO for Data & Technical Fellow, Microsoft
Title: Cloud + Data + ML: Opportunities and Challenges
Abstract: Breakthroughs in machine learning, scale-out storage and analytics, and cost-effective cloud services are creating a fundamental shift in computing. Data is now a core asset. AI is becoming a foundational tool in realizing value from data. These changes offer us an opportunity to rethink business strategies and scientific enterprises in radically different, data-driven ways.
In this talk, I will discuss the current technology landscape, the opportunities to bring ML to bear on a range of data-driven tasks, and the challenges of responsible data governance when doing so on high-value and sensitive data.
11:15 – 11:45 Break
11:45- 12:45 Plenary Talk: Sriram Rajamani (opens in new tab), Managing Director, Microsoft Research India
Title: Program Synthesis meets Machine Learning
Abstract: We give a tutorial overview of program synthesis, from its first formulation by Church in 1957, through its pragmatic evolution through sketching and programing-by-examples, and compare program synthesis with supervised machine learning. We then present our recent efforts in combining program synthesis and machine learning techniques to solve the problem of synthesizing extractors from heterogeneous data. Finally, we explore several opportunities at the intersection of program synthesis (and more broadly the PL community) and machine learning, such as pruning and ranking programs during synthesis, neural program synthesis and automatic differentiation.
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:45 Track: Systems Support for AI, Moderated by Chandu Thekkath (opens in new tab), Microsoft
Track Speakers: Timothy Roscoe (opens in new tab), Muthian Sivathanu (opens in new tab) , Nishanth Chandran (opens in new tab)
15:45: 16:05 Break
16:05 – 16: 50 Panel Discussion: Challenges & Opportunities in AI – some perspectives, Moderated by P J Narayanan , Director IIIT Hyderabad (opens in new tab)
Panelists: Saikat Guha (opens in new tab), Shankar Narasimhan (opens in new tab), Ravi R (opens in new tab), Ganesh Sankaralingam (opens in new tab)
16:50 – 18:00 Poster Session
18:00 – 19:00 Travel to Dinner
19:00 – 22:00 Dinner
Friday, 25th January
09:30 – 10:30 Plenary Talk: Sunita Sarawagi (opens in new tab), Professor, IIT Bombay
Title: Redesigning Neural Architectures for Sequence to Sequence Learning
Abstract: The Encoder-Decoder model with soft-attention is now the defacto standard for sequence to sequence learning, having enjoyed early success in tasks like translation, error correction, and speech recognition. In this talk, I will present a critique of various aspect of this popular model, including its soft attention mechanism, local loss function, and sequential decoding. I will present a new Posterior Attention Network for a more transparent joint attention that provides easy gains on several translation and morphological inflection tasks. Next, I will expose a little known problem of mis-calibration in state of the art neural machine translation (NMT) systems. For structured outputs like in NMT, calibration is important not just for reliable confidence with predictions, but also for proper functioning of beam-search inference. I will discuss reasons for mis-calibration and some fixes. Finally, I will summarize recent research efforts towards parallel decoding of long sequences.
10:30 – 11:20 Industry talk: Varun Aggarwal (opens in new tab), Co-Founder, Aspiring Minds
Title: Using AI in the industry, sprucing up academia
Abstract: I will discuss how we have used AI over the last 7 years to build tools for grading skills and providing feedback. I will discuss examples of grading programs, video interviews and simulating chats. Through these, I will demonstrate the opportunities in using AI in the industry, the challenges and pitfalls. In the latter part of the talk, I will talk about the gaps in science policy in India based on my recent book. These seriously impede India’s AI efforts, which need to be immediately addressed.
11:20 – 11:45 Break
11:45 – 13:45 Track: AI for Societal Impact , Moderated by Amit Sharma (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Track Speakers: Saket Anand (opens in new tab), Kameswari Chebrolu (opens in new tab), Purvi Shah (opens in new tab), Ronak Sutaria (opens in new tab)
13:45 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:45 Track: Technologies for India, Hosted by Dr. Hemant Pande (opens in new tab), Executive Director, ACM India
Track Speakers: Sanjay Jain (opens in new tab) , Saurabh Panjwani (opens in new tab) , P S Nair – TeamIndus, Siddharth Shetty – iSPIRT
15:45 – 16:15 Wrap-up & Closing