We are excited to announce our keynote speakers for the event!
AI for Public Health and Conservation
Learning and Planning in the Data-to-Deployment Pipeline
Abstract: With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. We focus on the problems of public health and wildlife conservation, and present research advances in multiagent systems to address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to effectively deploy our limited intervention resources in these problem domains. We present our deployments from around the world as well as lessons learned that we hope are of use to researchers who are interested in AI for Social Impact. Achieving social impact in these domains often requires methodological advances; we will highlight key research advances in topics such as computational game theory, multi-armed bandits and influence maximization in social networks for addressing challenges in public health and conservation. In pushing this research agenda, we believe AI can indeed play an important role in fighting social injustice and improving society. 
Bio: Milind Tambe is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research in Computation and Society at Harvard University; concurrently, he is also Director “AI for Social Good” at Google Research India. He is a recipient of the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award from AAMAS, AAAI Robert S Engelmore Memorial Lecture award, INFORMS Wagner prize, Rist Prize of the Military Operations Research Society, Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award, AAMAS influential paper award, best paper awards at conferences including AAMAS, IJCAI, IVA. He has also received meritorious commendations and letters of appreciation from the US Coast Guard, Los Angeles Airport, and the US Federal Air Marshals Service. Prof. Tambe is a fellow of AAAI and ACM.
Humor, Comedy, and Social Robots
Abstract:
Most of the current humor research is focused on understanding jokes and other verbal humor, for example, puns and conversational humor. Especially the latter can find useful applications in human-robot interaction. So far understanding of humor has escaped algorithmic approaches. There is ‘canned’ and scripted humor, and there is accidental humor. Usually, there is no generation of spontaneous humor, that is, humor that requires some real-time assessment of the interaction context. One way to deal with this is to look for applications in more or less controlled environments, for example, humorous humanoid robots performing in shows, on stage, and in stand-up comedy. This should not prevent us from researching humor in general and its applications in smart environments inhabited by humans and smart agents. In this talk, we survey some existing humorous robot applications and attempts to use smart technology for facilitating humor creation. From the latter, we derive some observations that help to make a transition from humor research to embodied humor research.
Bio: Anton Nijholt started his professional life as a programmer at TNO-Delft, he studied civil engineering, mathematics, and computer science at the Delft University of Technology and did his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He held positions at the University of Twente, the University of Nijmegen, McMaster University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, and the Netherlands Institute for the Advanced Study of Humanities and Social Sciences. For some years he was a scientific advisor of Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven. 
He initiated the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente. Some years he was a global research fellow at the Imagineering Institute in Iskandar, Malaysia. In 2018 he became a member of Microsoft’s Advisory Board on Brain-Computer Interfaces. Nijholt acted as a supervisor of 50 Ph.D. students. Current interest is in human-computer interaction, entertainment computing, humor research, playable cities, and augmented reality. He has been program chair and general chair of the main international conferences devoted to these topics (ICMI, F&G, ACE, IVA, ACII). Nijholt is chief-editor of the specialty section Human-Media Interaction of Frontiers in Psychology/Computer Science and series editor of the Springer Series on Gaming Media and Social Effects. Recent papers are on humor, comedy, and augmented reality. Recent books are on Playable Cities and Brain Art.