Events
Please join us for any of the events listed below. There is no need to rsvp, unless noted otherwise. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, or if you want to coordinate on an event, please email Thomas Hofweber at hofweber@unc.edu. Further events are presently being organized. Zoom links to all Zoom events are sent to the mailing list.
Spring 2024 events
April 25 and 26: Two day Symposium on AI and Society, in person on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. This event features discussions on the impact of AI on society, including topics such as ethical and moral AI, trustworthy and interpretable Large Language Models (LLMs), and social intelligence, led by experts across disciplines including computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and data science. Join us for presentations of the latest work on AI and contribute to the dialogue on AI’s role in society.
The program is just below. More information on the symposium, including the abstracts of the talks, can be found here. A flyer for the event is here.
Program:
All talks are in Brooks 141.
Thursday, April 25:
9:00-9:15 Welcome (Bansal, Hofweber)
9:15-10:30 Josh Dever (UT Austin) “(When) Is It What’s On The Inside That Counts? Balancing Internalist and Externalist Considerations in LLM Metasemantics”
10:30-10:45 break
10:45-12:00 Munindar P. Singh (NC State) “New Models for Trustworthy AI, Norm Deviation, and Consent in Responsible Autonomy”
12:00-2:00 lunch break
2:00-3:15 Jana Schaich Borg (Duke) and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke) “Moral AI and How We Get There”
3:15-3:30 break
3:30-4:45 Bo Li (U Chicago) “Risk Assessment, Safety Alignment, and Guardrails for
Generative Models”
Friday, April 26:
9:15-10:30 Maarten Sap (CMU) “Artificial Social Intelligence? On the challenges of Socially Aware and Ethically informed LLMs”
10:30-10:45 break
10:45 – 12:00 Peter Hase (UNC) “Toward Safe LLMs: Interpretability, Model Editing, and Scalable Oversight”
12:00-2:15 lunch break
2:15-3:30 Kathleen Creel (Northeastern) “Algorithmic Monoculture and the Ethics of Systemic Exclusion”
3:30-3:45 break
3:45-5:00 Brenden Lake (NYU) “Addressing two classic debates in cognitive science with AI”
March 22, 12-1:30 pm: Merrimon Lecture: Verdict Ravitsky “Ethical Aspects of AI in Biomedical Research” 321 MacNider Hall. For more information, see here.
March 18, 6:30-8 pm: a talk by Brian Hedden on “Algorithmic Fairness” Gardner Hall 08 (in person) For more information, see here.
February 23: 5:30-7:30: Panel discussion on Ethics of AI. Hanes Art Center Room 121. For registration, please go here. For more information, see this flyer.
February 22: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm: Workshop on “The Humanities in the World of Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Threats” in person at the IAH and on Zoom. For more see this link.
Fall 2023 Events
December 7, noon – 1 pm: Last meeting of the explainable AI reading group. Reading tba. On Zoom.
Monday, November 20, 2:30 – 5:30 pm: Workshop on AI: computer science and philosophy
Please join us for an in-person workshop on AI.
Location: Sitterson/Brooks FB 141
Program:
2:30 – 2:40: Welcome (Organizers: Mohit Bansal and Thomas Hofweber)
2:40 – 3:20: Stanley Ahalt (UNC) “The AI revolution: universities’ challenges, responsibilities, and accountability.”
3:20 – 4:00: Chudi Zhong (Duke) “Towards Trustworthy AI: Interpretable Machine Learning Algorithms that Produce All Good Models”
4:00 – 4:10: Break
4:10 – 4:50: Peter Hase (UNC) “What Are You Really Editing? Surprising Differences in Where Knowledge is Stored vs. Can Be Injected in Language Models”
4:50 – 5:30: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke): “Using AI to Predict Human Moral Judgments: The Case Study of Kidney Allocation”
Thurday, November 2, noon – 1 pm: AI Project reading group meeting. We will discuss Kate Vredenburgh’s article entitled “The right to explanation”. On Zoom. Zoom link is sent to the mailing list.
Wednesday, October 18, noon – 1 pm: the Carolina Seminar on Philosophy, Ethics and Mental Health is hosting a Zoom talk by Şerife Tekin on “Artificial Intelligence, Chatbot Therapists and the Future of Psychiatry”. More on it is here.
Thursday, October 5, noon – 1 pm: AI Project reading group meeting. We will discuss Will Fleisher’s article “Understanding, Idealization, and Explainable AI” On Zoom. The Zoom link is sent to the mailing list.
Monday, October 2: In Vitro Neural Platforms conference. All day. In person.
Thursday, September 21, noon – 1 pm: AI Project reading group meeting. We will discuss Cynthia Rudin’s article “Stop Explaining Black Box Machine Learning Models for High Stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead” On Zoom. As always, the link is sent to the mailing list.
Spring 2023 Events
Wednesday, May 3, noon-1 pm: Final meeting of the Language Model Reading Group for the Spring Semester. We will read work in progress by David Chalmers, namely “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?”. On Zoom again, Zoom link is in the email sent to the mailing list.
Wednesday, April 12, noon-1 pm: Language Model Reading Group: We will discuss a new paper by Jacob Andreas entitled “Language models as agent models”. We will meet on Zoom again. The Zoom link is emailed to the mailing list.
February 24, noon – 1 pm: Language Model Reading Group. We meet to discuss a recent article on philosophical issues related to language models. This week we discuss the issues featured in “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data” by Emily Bender and Alexander Koller. Location: Caldwell Hall, 213. (in person)
March 3, 11 am: Computational Linguistics Brown bag: Andriy Rusyn (HabitCoach.ai) on large language models. More details are here. Location: Hanes 125 (in person) CANCELED to be rescheduled
March 10: noon – 1 pm: Language Model Reading Group: We will discuss the issues raised in “Meaning without reference in large language models” by Steven Piantadosi and Felix Hill. Location: Caldwell Hall, Room 213 (in person)
March 24, 11 am: Computational Linguistics Brown bag: Brandon Prickett, Topic tba. Location Hanes 125 (in person)
March 31: noon – 1 pm Language Model Reading Group: A presentation by Peter Hase, on belief in language models and model editing. Pre-reading is Daniel Dennett’s short “Do animals have beliefs?” On Zoom. Zoom link to be posted here soon. We are not supposed to post Zoom links, so please email Thomas Hofweber (hofweber@unc.edu) or join our mailing list for the link.