Keynote Speakers
Prabhakar Raghavan
Search Engines: From the Lab to the Engine Room, and Back
Abstract: Web search engines are examples of scientific research flowing into planet-scale artifacts at unprecedented speed. The (relatively young) Web Conference series is replete with examples of both research that found its way into products and in turn, of research inspired by products.
In this talk, we will review some of these examples and highlight open research areas. We will also spend time on the nuanced questions that arise in the operation of a search engine: information quality vs. misinformation, the slowing growth of Web content, notions of bias, and advertising.
Prabhakar Raghavan is a Senior Vice President at Google, where his responsibilities include Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments. Prabhakar is one of the foremost authorities on Search and is the co-author of two widely-used graduate texts on algorithms and on search: Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. He has over 20 years of research spanning algorithms, web search ,and databases, has published over 100 papers, and holds 20 issued patents, including several on link analysis for web search.
Prior to joining Google in 2012, he founded and led Yahoo! Labs, served as CTO at Verity, and held various leadership positions at IBM Research. Prabhakar holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE; a former editor in chief for the Journal of the ACM; and was a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. In 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna.
Virginia Dignum
Responsible AI: From Principles To Action
Abstract: Every day we see news about advances and the societal impact of AI. AI is changing the way we work, live and solve challenges but concerns about fairness, transparency or privacy are also growing.
Ensuring AI ethics is more than designing systems whose result can be trusted. It is about the way we design them, why we design them, and who is involved in designing them. In order to develop and use AI responsibly, we need to work towards technical, societal, institutional and legal methods and tools which provide concrete support to AI practitioners, as well as awareness and training to enable participation of all, to ensure the alignment of AI systems with our societies’ principles and values.
Virginia Dignum is Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden and associated with the TU Delft in the Netherlands. She is the director of WASP-HS, the Wallenberg Program on Humanities and Society for AI, Autonomous Systems and Software, the largest Swedish national research program on fundamental multidisciplinary research on the societal and human impact of AI.
She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). Her current research focus is on the specification, verification and monitoring of ethical and societal principles for intelligent autonomous systems.
She is committed to policy and awareness efforts towards the responsible development and use of AI, as member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the working group on Responsible AI of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the World Economic Forum’s Global Artificial Intelligence Council, lead for UNICEF’s guidance for AI and children, the Executive Committee of the IEEE Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design, and as founding member of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance. Her book “Responsible Artificial Intelligence: developing and using AI in a responsible way” was published by Springer-Nature in 2019.
Jaime Teevan
How the Web Will Shape the Hybrid Work Era
Abstract: We are in the middle of the most significant change to work practices that we’re likely to see in our lifetimes. For the past several millennia, space has been the primary technology people have used to get things done. The coming Hybrid Work Era, however, will be shaped by web technology and people’s ability to work together online.
In this talk I will give an overview of what research tells us about emerging work practices following the rapid move to remote work in March 2020, and discuss the opportunity ahead of us to intentionally revisit how online and physical spaces interact so that we can create a new – and better – future of work. https://aka.ms/nfw
Jaime Teevan is Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where she is responsible for driving research-backed innovation in the company’s core products. Jaime is an advocate for finding smarter ways for people to make the most of their time, and believes in the positive impact that breaks and recovery have on productivity. She leads Microsoft’s future of work initiative, which brings researchers from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub together to study how the pandemic has changed the way people work.
Previously she was Technical Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and led the Productivity team at Microsoft Research. Jaime has received numerous awards for her research, including the Technology Review TR35, Borg Early Career, Karen Sparck Jones, and SIGIR Test of Time awards. She holds a Ph.D. in AI from MIT and a B.S. from Yale, and is affiliate faculty at the University of Washington.
