Talk by Dr. Hang Li (Toutiao, China)

Speaker:
Dr. Hang Li (Toutiao, China)

Title:
Machines That Act Rationally

Abstract:
According to Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence is
a field in science and engineering about building intelligent
machines, and there are four possible definitions on intelligent
machines, namely machines thinking humanly, machines acting humanly,
machines thinking rationally, and machines acting rationally. In this
talk, I will discuss several issues with regard to building machines
acting rationally (MAR). I will first summarize the main
characteristics of MAR. After that, I will introduce several recent
studies in neuroscience and cognitive science on how humans behave
rationally. Next, I will discuss how to build MAR using AI
particularly machine learning technologies. Finally, I will introduce
our recent work on paraphrase generation in natural language
processing using deep reinforcement learning, which can be viewed as
an example of building MAR. In the work, we let the system to learn
not only how to act rationally (to generate good paraphrases), but
also how to evaluate rationality (evaluate good paraphrases).

Bio:
Hang Li is a director of Bytedance AI Lab, adjunct professors of
Peking University and Nanjing University. He is an IEEE Fellow and an
ACM Distinguished Scientist. His research areas include information
retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and data
mining. Hang graduated from Kyoto University in 1988 and earned his
PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1998. He worked at NEC Research as
researcher from 1990 to 2001, Microsoft Research Asia as senior
researcher and research manager from 2001 to 2012, and chief
scientist and director of Huawei Noah’s Ark from 2012 to 2017. He
joined Bytedance (also known as Toutiao) in 2017. Hang has published
three technical books, and more than 120 technical papers at top
international conferences including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, ACL, EMNLP,
ICML, NIPS, SIGKDD, AAAI, IJCAI, and top international journals
including CL, NLE, JMLR, TOIS, IRJ, IPM, TKDE, TWEB, TIST. He and his
colleagues’ papers received the SIGKDD’08 best application paper
award, the SIGIR’08 best student paper award, the ACL’12 best student
paper award. Hang worked on the development of several products such
as Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Office 2007, Live Search 2008, Bing
2009, Office 2010, Bing 2010, Office 2012, Huawei smartphones 2014 and
Huawei smartphones 2017. He has 42 granted US patents. Hang is also
very active in the research communities and has served or is serving
top international conferences as PC chair, Senior PC member, or PC
member, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, ACL, NACL, EMNLP, NIPS, SIGKDD,
ICDM, IJCAI, ACML, and top international journals as associate editor
or editorial board member, including CL, IRJ, TIST, JASIST, JCST.