La Nau hosts the Second Meeting of ValgrAI’s Joint Research Unit
Valencia, October 31, 2023.- La Nau hosted the Second Meeting of ValgrAI’s Joint Research Unit, where not only the latest innovations and projects developed in Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Valencian universities were highlighted, but also the fact that the Valencian Community is a leader in research on the law of AI.
ValgrAI’s General Director, Vicente Botti, emphasized the importance of generating knowledge forums where the projects being developed in both Valencian Universities and companies can be highlighted, and where ValgrAI serves as a backbone for this ecosystem.
For her part, ValgrAI’s Managing Director, Ana Cidad, took this opportunity to introduce the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Alliance (AIIA), which aims to create an innovation community in Artificial Intelligence involving researchers, students, and professionals from universities, research centers, companies, and entities interested in this technology. All to promote dissemination, knowledge exchange, and talent attraction, coordinating cooperation between the various stakeholders and generating synergies around AI in the Valencian Innovation System.
In addition, ValgrAI’s Managing Director informed that Esther Cerveró has joined this project as Coordinator of Communication and Innovation and Head of the AIIA Project, and Héctor Calvete as Innovation Agent, funded by the Valencian Innovation Agency and the European Union.
ValgrAI, which is made up of the Ministry of Education, Universities, and Employment, and the five Valencian universities, specifically, the University of Valencia, the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the University of Alicante, Jaume I University and Miguel Hernández University, also has the support of collaborating companies. In fact, Cidad insisted that although ValgrAI is a non-profit foundation, it needs the involvement of Valencian companies to consolidate the Valencian Community as a benchmark in AI.
The first presentation of the day was given by Emilio Soria-Olivas, representative of the Department of Industrial Electronic Engineering of the Technical School of Engineering of the University of Valencia, who discussed “Industrial AI Projects in IDAL.” Specifically, he presented predictive behavior models applied to Aranco and Galp, Voclity, the use of text-to-speech models to clone human voices for automatic narration, distortion in high-power speakers for the company DAS, insect detection for Dismutel, and fake ID identification for FOXid. A wide range of examples showing the vast possibilities of AI for companies.
Paolo Rosso from the Polytechnic University of Valencia presented “Natural Language Processing Tasks in PRHLT.” Specifically, he focused on the application of AI in detecting fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate messages. In this regard, he said that these issues are of great concern to Spaniards. In fact, before the Coronavirus, 88% thought that these were problems to be addressed, and currently, 86% of citizens believe that these are issues that must be faced. In this context, he stated that at the European level, Spain, along with the United Kingdom, are the countries that attach the most importance to them.
During his presentation, he highlighted the importance of emotions when issuing such harmful messages for society, and referred to a recent study by EMT that states that fake news spreads more quickly than true information because it appeals to emotions, not only lexically but also through the image. Thus, detection and analysis mechanisms are being established for this type of behavior, such as the Hurtful Humour (HUHU) Detection of humor spreading prejudice on Twitter.
On the other hand, Lorenzo Cotino, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Valencia, gave a lecture on “Regulation and Rights of AI” and explained that not only does he direct several research projects from the Faculty of Law related to AI, but currently, there are more than 30 professors dedicated to digital law and AI and very leading research groups, making the Valencian Community a leading region in these topics. He also pointed out that although work is being done on an AI regulation that companies should already take into account, the truth is that there is already regulation on AI because there are laws such as the Data Protection Law and the Right to Privacy that must be complied with.
José Martín Guerrero, Professor of the Department of Electronic Engineering and representative of the Intelligent Data Analysis Laboratory (IDAL) of the University of Valencia, spoke about Quantum Artificial Intelligence and delved into projects like Quantum memristors, PINNs for counterdiabatic driving, Quantum information retrieval, and Quantum clustering.
Raul Montoliu, representative of UJI, presented the project “Creation of agents for multi-action games,” stating that games and video games pose a challenge for current AI algorithms especially because the possibilities or branch factor are countless. Companies that create these games need fictional players that behave like humans.
In this situation, Montoliu pointed out that games are being implemented as challenges to develop advanced AI algorithms and create new methods for efficient play. In fact, they have devised ASMACAG (A Simple Multi-Action Card Game) to establish reinforcement learning algorithms, generate understandable and well-structured code, and check if it works.
Carlos Marín, one of the postdoctoral researchers funded by the ValgrAI Foundation and a member of the UJI Gamers research group, addressed in his talk the topic of “Artificial intelligence tools applied to video game development.” He noted that currently, this industry generates a profit of 183 million dollars a year. Marín stated that automation through AI of processes between illustrators and programmers should have more weight to optimize processes and minimize conflict between the different participants in the creation of a video game.
The last talk of the day was given by Joaquín Taverner, representative of the Information Technology Group of the Polytechnic University, who delivered the presentation “GTIIA Group and Emotional Agents.” An initiative that aims to lay the foundations for Responsible AI through the modeling of complex socio-economic and industrial systems, solutions based on automation using AI techniques, and the simulation of possible scenarios. All this to create a virtual society in which humans and agents can coexist.
