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AI Mellontology
e-Symposium 2021

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15 September 2021,
9h-18h CEST

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About the
e-Symposium

Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses serious R&D and societal challenges to address in the near future.
Here are two notable examples:

  • Knowledge is the basis of our society, yet it is not formally quantified. How can we quantify knowledge, knowledge aggregation and transfer (education)?
  • How can we build trustworthy and humanistic AI, while still advancing economic growth and competitiveness?

Horizon2020 AI flagship R&D projects: AI4Media and ELISE, together with the International AI Doctoral Academy (AIDA) joined forces in sponsoring the AI Methodology e-Symposium 2021, where participants will be able to debate hot AI issues of any form on any scientific, societal, industrial/economic AI aspect.

Discussion sessions will be informal and hopefully lively and hot aiming to debate contrasting views (thesis-antithesis) on each issue.

Session panelists will make their short statements before and/or during the panel to be discussed by the audience.
There will be 3 AI science/technology sessions in the morning and 3 AI society / industry /  economy sessions in the afternoon.

You are welcome to a) see other views and voice your own views on any panel topic, by using the ‘Voice your views’ area and b) actively participate in each panel discussion.The more innovative, futuristic, even provocative your views are, the better. The discussion will be conducted though in a scientific way and in good faith.

The entire discussion and contributions will be compiled later on in a public ‘AI research white paper’ that will be used to guide R&D anywhere in the world, notably in the framework of AIDA and ICT48 R&D projects.

Key information

WHEN?

The e-Symposium will take place on 15 September 2021 at 9am CEST.

WHO?

This e-Symposium will be organized by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under the frame of AI4Media project.

WHERE?

All 2021 e-Symposium discussions and proceedings will be delivered remotely using Zoom.Click this ZOOM LINK to access the event.

Attendance is free of charge, anybody is welcome to attend. No registration is needed.

All e-symposium proceedings will be in English.

To stay tuned for future activities, register in the following email lists:

This e-Symposium will take place on 15 September
2021 at 9:00-18:00 CEST

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Program

Panel-initiated discussions (morning session 9:00-13:00 CEST)
– Scientific/technical panel topics:

Coordinator: Prof. N. Cesa-Bianchi, University of Milan

9:00 - 9:15 – "Opening"

Prof. I. Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

9:15 - 10:15 – "Navigating Disinformation Landscapes within Synthetic Realities. AI a friend or a foe?"

  • Moderators: Dr. S. Papadopoulos (ITI-CERTH) and Dr. N. Sarris (ITI-CERTH)
  • Panelists: R. Fletcher (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism), Prof. M. Bielikova (Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies), A. Følstad (SINTEF)
Panel topic description

10:15 - 11:15 – "New Learning Methods"

  • Moderators: Prof. N. Sebe (Univ. of Trento)
  • Panelists: Prof. A. Del Bimbo (Univ. of Florence) R. Tudor Ionescu (Univ. of Bucharest) Prof. C. Snoek (Univ. of Amsterdam)
Panel topic description

11:15 - 11:45 – Coffee Break

11:45 - 12:45 – "Grand AI Challenges"

  • Moderators: Prof. I. Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Panel topic description

Panel-initiated discussions (afternoon sessions 14:00-18:00 CEST)
– Social panel topics:

Coordinator: Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris, ITI-CERTH

14:00 - 15:00 – "Trustworthy AI for a Fair World"

  • Moderators: Prof. T. Tommasi (Politecnico di Torino) B. Caputo (Idiap Research Institute)
  • Panelists: G. Bernini (Fondazione Bracco) M. Haataja (Saidot), Prof. B. Nessler (Johannes Kepler University),  Prof. T. Tommasi (Politecnico di Torino)
Panel topic description

15:00 - 16:00 – "Legal Personality of AI"

  • Moderators: K. Heine (Erasmus School of Law and Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Digital Governance)
  • Panelists: Prof. K. Heine, Dr. A. Quintavalla (Erasmus School
    of Law
Panel topic description

16:00 - 16:30 – Coffee Break

16:30 - 17:30 – "AI Act and GDPR impact on European growth and competitiveness"

  • Moderators: Prof. I. Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
  • Panelists: E. Girardi (Pop AI), Prof. I. Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Dr. S. Scalzo (DG CNECT, European Commission), Prof. P. Van Cleynenbreugel (University of Liège)
Panel topic description

17:30 - 18:00 – "AI Mellontology Follow-up: AI white Paper. AI Challenges"

(All, Chair: Prof. I. Pitas)

VOICE YOUR VIEWS!

Share your views about the AI R&D topics and challenges discussed
in the panels.

Submit an AI research challenge you think is grand indeed. Younger AI researcher views are particularly encouraged.

The more innovative, futuristic, even provocative your views are, the better. You can also present them during the panel discussion. They may be included in the upcoming ‘AI research white paper’.

* Your personal information (name and email) will be treated as confidential

Select a panel topic

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Organizing Committee

Prof. Ioannis Pitas

AI Mellontology e-Symposium Chair: Prof. Ioannis Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - AUTH)

(IEEE Fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) received the Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 1994, he has been a Professor at the Department of Informatics of the same University. His current interests are in the areas of image/video processing, machine learning, computer vision, intelligent digital media, human-centered interfaces, affective computing, 3D imaging, and biomedical imaging. He has published over 920 papers, contributed in 45 books in his areas of interest and edited or (co-)authored another 11 books. He has also been member of the program committee of many scientific conferences and workshops. In the past he served as Associate Editor or co-Editor of 9 international journals and General or Technical Chair of 4 international conferences. He participated in 71 R&D projects, primarily funded by the European Union and is/was principal investigator/researcher in 41 such projects. He leads International AI Doctoral Academy (AIDA) and is PI in Horizon2020 EU funded R&D projects AI4Media (1 of the 4 AI flagship projects in Europe) and AerialCore. He has 33300+ citations to his work and h-index 86+.

Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris

Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris (Centre for Research & Technology Hellas - CERTH)

Dr. Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris is a Research Director at CERTH-ITI, the Head of Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory and Deputy Director of the Institute. His research interests include ΑΙ/Machine Learning for multimedia analysis, Semantics (multimedia ontologies and reasoning), Social Media and Big Data Analytics, Multimodal and Sensors Data Analysis and Human-Computer Interfaces. He is the co-author of 178 papers in refereed journals, 63 book chapters, 8 patents and 560 papers in international conferences. Since 2001, Dr. Kompatsiaris has participated in 88 National and European research programs, in 31 of which he has been the Project Coordinator. He has also been the PI in 15 contracts from the industry. He has been the co-chair of various international conferences and workshops including the 13th IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP 2018) Workshop and has served as a regular reviewer, associate and guest editor for a number of journals and conferences currently being an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is a member of the National Ethics and Technoethics Committee, the Scientific Advisory Board of the CHIST-ERA funding programme and an elected member of the IEEE Image, Video and Multidimensional Signal Processing – Technical Committee (IVMSP – TC). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM. Since January 2014, he is a co-founder of the Infalia private company, a high-tech SME focusing on data-intensive web services and applications.

Prof. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Prof. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi (University of Milan)

Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Milan, Italy. His main research interests are the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms for statistical and online learning, multi-armed bandit problems, and graph analytics. He is co-author of the monographs "Prediction, Learning, and Games" and "Regret Analysis of Stochastic and Nonstochastic Multi-armed Bandit Problems". He served as President of the Association for Computational Learning and co-chaired the program committees of some of the most important machine learning conferences, including NeurIPS, COLT, and ALT. He is the recipient of a Google Research Award, a Xerox Foundation Award, a Criteo Faculty Award, and a Google Focused Award. He is ELLIS fellow and co-director of the ELLIS program on Interactive Learning and Interventional Representations. He serves on the steering committees of the Italian Laboratory on AI and Intelligent Systems and of the Italian PhD program on AI.

Sponsors

If you want to sponsor this event, please contact Ioanna Koronani:
koroniioanna@csd.auth.gr

The next Symposium in 2021 will be physical!

The event will be organized in the informal and inspirational forms of the ancient Symposia (which means co-drinking, while debating), combined with visits to:

Image of Aristotele birthplace
Aristotle image
Image of Aristotle school

Aristotle birthplace

Stageira, Chalkidiki, Greece

Aristotle school

Mieza, Imathia, Greece

The philosophical basis of Artificial Intelligence can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, founder of Logic and,
to a good extend, of Ethics.