CITI seminar – Frédéric Prost (CITI) – 04/05 at 12:15

Speaker: Frédéric Prost is an associate professor hosted by the CITI laboratory: https://lig-membres.imag.fr/prost/

Date: 04/05/2023

Time: 12h15

Place: Amphi Chappe/Lamarr, 6 avenue des arts, La Doua Campus

Title: AI Risk: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess

Abstract: The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries.

Recent advances in AI (GPT-4, Midjourney etc.) have raised an important discussion on the societal risk of AI. Several articles, and a recent request for a moratorium of 6 months in AI research (signed by thousands of AI researchers and influential figures from politics, economics etc. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/) have been published in the last few weeks.

In this talk I will tackle the issue of AI risk from an historical perspective. In chess the AI are stronger than humans for more than a quarter of century (Kasparov loss to Deep Blue dates back to 1997). We can use this history as a proxy to discuss fears/hopes and to explore what happens when AI develops super human capabilities (for instance how the chess community has evolved). Of course the range of the chess is wolrd is limited in its scope with relation to LLMs. But it is interesting and justified because, when one is trying to study a complex phenomenon, isolating experiments in a lab allows the reduction of noise.

Bio: Frédéric Prost est MdC à l’université Grenoble Alpes et au laboratoire LIG, hébergé au CITI. Il a principalement travaillé dans la théorie des langages de programmation (réécriture de graphes, sémantique des langages d’interrogation des BD graphes) et les problématiques de confidentialité (analyse de non interférence, anonymisation de bases de données graphe).


CITI seminar – Khac-Hoang Ngo (Chalmers University of Technology) – 20/04 at 10:00

Speaker: Khac-Hoang Ngo (Chalmers University of Technology)

Date: 20/04/2023

Time: 10h00

Place: Amphi Chappe/Lamarr, 6 avenue des arts, La Doua Campus

Title: Unsourced Multiple Access: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Abstract: The drastic growth of the number of connected devices gives rise to the Internet of Things (IoT). Massive IoT connectivity targets a large number of low-cost, battery-limited, narrowband devices—meters, sensors, trackers, wearables—that transmit small data volumes in a sporadic and uncoordinated manner. These key features are captured by the unsourced multiple access (UMA) model proposed by Polyanskiy (2017), where all users transmit their messages using the same codebook and the decoder returns an unordered list of messages. In this talk, we introduce the UMA framework and Polyanskiy’s random-coding achievability bound for the Gaussian UMA channel. We then extend this bound to the case of random and unknown number of active users, thus fully account for the random user activity. Finally, we investigate a setting where, on top of the standard UMA messages, the users transmit a common alarm message that needs to be decoded with higher reliability; we thereby study the coexistence of massive and critical IoT.

Bio: Khac-Hoang Ngo (https://khachoang1412.github.io/) received the B.Eng. degree (Hons.) in electronics and telecommunications from Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2014; and the M.Sc. degree (Hons.) and Ph.D. degree in wireless communications from CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay University, France, in 2016 and 2020, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis was also realized at Paris Research Center, Huawei Technologies France. Since September 2020, he has been a postdoc at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden under a project funded by the MSCA Individual Fellowship. His research interests include wireless communications and information theory, with an emphasis on massive random access, edge computing, MIMO, noncoherent communications, coded caching, and network coding. He received the Honda Award for Young Engineers and Scientists in Vietnam in 2013 and the “Signal, Image & Vision Ph.D. Thesis Prize” by Club EEA, GRETSI and GdR-ISIS, France, in 2021.