Our
InspiringKeynote speakers
Luciano Floridi
Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Digital Ethics Lab (DELab) of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). He is also Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and Chair of its Data Ethics research Group, and Chairman of the Ethics Advisory Board of the European Medical Information Framework. He seats on the EU’s Ethics Advisory Group on Ethical Dimensions of Data Protection, on the Royal Society and British Academy Working Group on Data Governance, and on Google Advisory Board on “the right to be forgotten”. His areas of expertise include the philosophy of information, digital ethics, and the philosophy of technology. Among his recent books, all published by Oxford University Press: The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014), The Ethics of Information (2013), The Philosophy of Information (2011).
Title :
The good web – some challenges and strategies to realise it
Schedule : Wednesday April 25th, 8:20am-10:20am
Abstract :
The web is polluted. Not very much. And certainly neither inevitably nor irreversibly. But enough to raise concerns. Disinformation (including fake news), intolerance, and extremisms of all sorts exploit some of the most cherished features of the web (accessibility, availability, openness, ease of communication, freedom of speech) to undermine its value and damage the foundations of the liberal societies that have created it.
In this talk, I will analyse the more conceptual nature of the some of the challenges in question, and look at the potential strategies that may be adopted to cope with them successfully.
Photo : courtesy of Ian Scott – 2016
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Lorrie Faith Cranor is a Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). She is associate department head of the Engineering and Public Policy Department and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company. She is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE and a member of the ACM CHI Academy. She has authored over 150 research papers on online privacy, usable security, and other topics.
Title :
Web Privacy and Security: The User Experience
Schedule : Friday April 27th, 8:40am-10:20am
Abstract :
Numerous web browser features, plugins, and industry efforts focus on
improving web privacy and security for users. For example, the major
web browsers offer tools designed to prevent tracking, reduce the
amount of browsing information stored on a user’s computer, generate
and store strong passwords, and alert users to potential security
problems. Industry organizations have created websites to allow users
to opt-out of tracking by their members, and regulations in Europe and
elsewhere require websites to post clear privacy notices before
collecting personal data from users. However, despite an abundance of
tools and rules, web security and privacy remains difficult for users
to achieve.
In this talk I will discuss empirical studies that provide
insights into users’ experiences with web privacy and security,
including online and laboratory studies, and longitudinal studies of
users’ interactions with security and privacy tools.
Ruhi Sarikaya
Ruhi Sarikaya joined Amazon Alexa team as the Director of Applied Science in September 2016. With the Alexa Brain team that he has largely built from the ground up, he has been building core capabilities around ranking, relevance, natural language understanding, dialog management, contextual understanding, personalization and end-to-end metrics.
Prior to that, he was a principal science manager and the founder of the language understanding and dialog systems group at Microsoft, Redmond, WA between 2011 and 2016. His group has built language understanding and dialog management capabilities of Cortana, Xbox One, and the underlying platform supporting both 1st and 3rd party.
Before Microsoft, he was a research staff member and team lead in the Human Language Technologies Group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY for ten years.
Before IBM, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder for two years.
He received his BS (1995) degree from Bilkent University, MS (1997) degree from Clemson University and Ph.D. (2001) degree from Duke University all in electrical and computer engineering.
He has published 120 technical papers in refereed journal and conference proceedings and, is inventor of over 70 issued/pending patents.
Title :
Conversational AI for Interacting with Digital and Physical World
Schedule : Thursday April 26th, 8:20am-10:20am
Abstract :
The way humans communicate with machines is at an inflection point where natural language is emerging as a key mode of interaction with digital and physical world and accessing the Web through intelligent assistants and agents. Even though there are strong secular trends behind this change and encouraging progress, some core challenges remain to be addressed. These challenges manifest themselves as ‘frictions’ in user’s interactions with these systems. Some of these challenges include application/service discovery, lack of applications knowledge, and limited understanding and modeling of user’s context. For example, users do not know the coverage of these systems in terms of the supported domains/applications with regards to their requests and they also do not know how to interact with these applications in a natural way. Moreover, these systems have a limited understanding of the user’s context to accurately reason about and understand their intent and serve the best answer. Unlike Web search, providing a single precise answer to a user’s request is a key requirement.
In this talk, we will give an overview of the intelligent assistants, how they work and key components powering them. We will also discuss the core challenges and explain what is needed to fully redefine human machine interaction through natural language.