Ming Lin

Socially Responsible and Trustworthy AI

Abstract

With recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI), there is an increasing interest to develop AI systems that are socially equitable and accountable, with a focus on greater social benefits and alignment of AI systems with human values, while minimizing biases and ensuring safety and reliability of AI systems for all users. In this talk, we present latest advances on (1) alignment of Large Language Models (LLM) and Visual-Language Models (VLM) with demographics and personality traits to best represent the diversity of human users and community-wide engagement patterns to health messaging; (2) accelerated reinforcement learning with Linear Temporal Logics to guarantee safety of learning-based systems with differentiable simulation to facilitate gradient-informed learning for improved efficacy; (3) efficient Time-Aware World Model (TAWM) that minimizes training costs with improved accuracy by adaptively sampling multiple time steps across scale for greener computing and energy efficiency. Together these methods showcase a collection of socially responsible and trustworthy AI algorithms that can provide more socially fair, equitable, and reliable technology for all different population groups alike.

Short bio

Ming C. Lin is currently a Distinguished University Professor and former Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science at the University of Maryland College Park and John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. She was also an Honorary Visiting Chair Professor at Tsinghua University in China and at University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She obtained her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She received several honors and awards, including the NSF Young Faculty Career Award in 1995, Honda Research Initiation Award in 1997, UNC/IBM Junior Faculty Development Award in 1999, UNC Hettleman Award for Scholarly Achievements in 2003, Beverly W. Long Distinguished Professorship 2007-2010, UNC WOWS Scholar 2009-2011, IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2010, Washington Academy of Sciences Distinguished Career Award in Computer Science in 2020, and many best paper awards at international conferences. She is a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors, ACM, IEEE, Eurographics, SIGGRAPH Academy, and IEEE VR Academy.

Her research interests include AI/ML, computational robotics, haptics, physically-based modeling, virtual reality, sound rendering, and geometric computing. She has (co-)authored more than 400 refereed publications in these areas and co-edited/authored 4 books. She has served on hundreds of program committees of leading conferences and co-chaired dozens of international conferences and workshops. She is currently an elected member of Computing Research Association and a member of Computing Research Association-Women (CRA-W) Board of Directors, Chair of IEEE Computer Society’s Harry H. Goode Memorial Award Committee and CRA Major Awards Committee. She was a former Chair of IEEE Computer Society (CS) Transactions Operating Committee and IEEE CS Computer Pioneer Award, and Founding Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. She is a former member of IEEE CS Board of Governors, a former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2011-2014), a former Chair of IEEE CS Transactions Operations Committee, and a member of several editorial boards. She also has served on several steering committees and advisory boards of international conferences, as well as government and industrial technical advisory committees. Many of Lin’s research findings have been patented and licensed by more than 70 companies world wide. She also co-founded Impulsonic, Inc. which was a 3D audio technology company that created physics-based audio spatialization software for game developers and VR systems. Impulsonic was acquired by Valve in 2016 and its product, PHONON, an interactive audio software toolkit, continues to be available through Valve’s SteamAudio.