Large Language Models: Risks, Opportunities and Responses

The Data Science Discipline of the School of EECS is hosting the following guest seminar:

Large Language Models: Risks, Opportunities and Responses

Speaker: Prof Geoff Webb (Monash University)
Host: Prof Helen Huang

Abstract: Large Language Models have made extraordinary advances in recent times. ChatGPT is one of the fastest growing apps of all time, with over 100 million users. On the back of its spectacular success, many voices have been forecasting doomsday outcomes whereby AI systems may subjugate humanity. This talk will give a high level overview of Large Language Models and present my thoughts on the potential benefits and likely risks of AI and what we should be doing about them.

Speaker Bio: Professor Geoff Webb is an eminent and highly-cited AI researcher. He was editor in chief of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, from 2005 to 2014. He has been Program Committee Chair of both ACM SIGKDD and IEEE ICDM, as well as General Chair of ICDM and member of the ACM SIGKDD Executive. He is a Technical Advisor to machine learning as a service startup BigML Inc and to recommender systems startup FROOMLE. He developed many of the key mechanisms of support-confidence association discovery in the 1980s.  His OPUS search algorithm remains the state-of-the-art in rule search. He pioneered multiple research areas as diverse as black-box user modelling, interactive data analytics and statistically-sound pattern discovery.  He has developed many useful machine learning algorithms that are widely deployed.  His many awards include IEEE Fellow, the inaugural Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science (2017) and the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Distinguished Research Contributions Award (2022).