Dear colleagues,

I would like to bring to your attention the program of the online workshop on Reflection on Intelligent Systems, organized by IRIS (Interchange forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems) at the University of Stuttgart.

When/where: the workshop will take place on October 20/21, online, and there is no participation fee (you just have to register, see the link in the program).

What: we have a very diverse program ranging different disciplines (NLP, physics, philosophy, education, literary studies, etc.). For the full program, see: https://www.iris.uni-stuttgart.de/public-engagement/event/Digital-Workshop-R... https://www.iris.uni-stuttgart.de/public-engagement/event/Digital-Workshop-Reflection-on-intelligent-systems-towards-a-cross-disciplinary-definition/

But to give you a gist, here are the titles/abstracts of the keynote talks:

Anne Lauscher (University of Hamburg) Fairness & Inclusion in Machine Learning for Text: Back to the Future? The majority of the research efforts in Natural Language Processing are mostly opting for better performance on major benchmarks and downstream tasks. However, it is vital to acknowledge that eventually, these systems will be deployed in a concrete sociotechnical environment, and, thus, their development and their decisions will directly or indirectly affect individuals and more generally, society as a whole. For instance, NLP systems are prone to encode and amplify unfair stereotypes and often simply fail to adequately represent terms referring to minority groups, which might lead to further discrimination and exclusion of marginalised individuals. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to the training mechanism of modern machine learning-based NLP systems and point to the input data as one potential source of these ethical issues with case studies in conversational AI and machine translation.

Bob Williamson (University of Tübingen) AI as Mediator Much of the current discussion of AI views it as an autonomous force. In this talk I will present a complementary view of “AI as mediator”, whereby AI is viewed as an intermediary between humans and the world. This does not solve all the problems of AI. But it does give a different way of thinking about them, and one which is better aligned with the view of AI as IA — Intelligence Augmentation. In pursuing this agenda, I will also talk about technology in general, the importance of context, the distinction between tools and machines, when and where decisions get made, and notions of delegation. The talk is more “mediations on mediation” than a definitive proposal or argument.

Gregor Betz (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) Are Large Language Models "Intelligent" Agents? Large Large Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 are causing a minor scientific revolution in NLP and AI. In the same time, these technologies have sparked broader controversies about their very nature as intelligent, possible sentient beings. In this keynote, I'll flashlight key controversies surrounding LLMs, re-visit some fundamental debates in philosophy of mind and epistemology, and try to come up with a philosophically informed outlook on LLMs as "intelligent" agents.

Kanta Dihal (University of Cambridge) A History of Imagining Intelligent Systems People have been imagining intelligent systems for millennia, in ways that vary greatly across cultures. While themes such as embodiment seem to be widespread, ideas of what constitutes an intelligent system and what its place in society should be are strongly dependent on cultural, national, and other contexts. Yet as artificial intelligence begins to fulfil its potential as a technology, spreading across the globe from its origins in 1950s America, many of these perspectives are marginalised. These stories, films, and visions matter: they are entangled in broader cultural attitudes and approaches to AI, reflecting or inspiring, embedding or disputing them. This lecture will introduce a history of such visions from across the globe, how they influence public perceptions of AI, and what they can tell us now that intelligent systems are becoming a technological reality.

Hope this is of interest for many of you!

Best, Gabriella