III ValgrAI Scientific Council Forum 2024
Welcome to the III ValgrAI Scientific Council Forum 2024, a forum of brilliant and pioneering minds in the field of artificial intelligence. This annual event has established itself as a milestone in the scientific calendar, attracting the most influential researchers, academics, and industry leaders in AI from around the world. With a focus on the latest advancements and transformative applications of AI, the forum offers a unique platform for the presentation of cutting-edge research, the debate of innovative ideas, and the formation of strategic collaborations.
🏛️ Where: Universitat Politècnica de Valencia – Edificio Nexus
📆 When: July 18th, 9am – July 19th, 2pm
In this third edition, we continue our mission to foster a shared knowledge ecosystem, where participants can immerse themselves in intensive sessions, interactive workshops, and discussion panels that address the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in our society. The forum is also a celebration of collective achievements in AI, recognizing those projects and solutions that are defining the future of technology.
Within this global two-day event, we will also enjoy the IV Encuentro UMI ValgrAI, a key event for professionals and academics in the field of Artificial Intelligence. This annual gathering represents an exceptional opportunity for researchers, students, and technology experts to share knowledge, discuss recent innovations, and explore future collaborations.
Meet our speakers
The heart of the ValgrAI Scientific Council Forum lies in its distinguished Scientific Council, composed of eminent figures in AI research.
This year, we are proud to present:
Hiroaki Kitano is Executive Deputy President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, overseeing the R&D ecosystem across Sony’s diverse business domains including electronics, semiconductors, and entertainment. He concurrently serves as CEO of Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL).
His work at Carnegie Mellon University to build large-scale data-driven AI systems on massively parallel computers led to The Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1993. His research contributions continued at Sony CSL and at California Institute of Technology in the field of systems biology, merging biology and systems science. Kitano is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation, serving as president of IJCAI (2009-2011), and is a member of scientific advisory boards for numerous academic institutions, including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School. He is a recipient of the Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science in 2009 and a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Kitano was an invited artist for La Biennale di Venezia (2000) and for Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – New York (2001).
Bachelor of Mathematics, Ph.D. in Computer Science, and Research Professor at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (CSIC-UPC), where she leads a research group in assistive robotics. She combines her dedication to research with literary writing and the promotion of technoethics. She has published books and articles on neural models, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and robotics, fields in which she has supervised 21 doctoral theses and led 17 European projects, including an ERC Advanced Grant on robotic manipulation of clothing. She is a Fellow of IEEE, EurAI, and ELLIS, a full member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, the Institute of Catalan Studies, and the European Academy. Her scientific work has received several recognitions, the most recent being the ‘Julio Peláez’ Award for pioneering women in science (2019), the National Research Award ‘Rey Pastor’ in mathematics and ICT (2020) awarded by the Government, and the National Research Award (2020) awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Her novels La mutació sentimental (Pagès editors, 2007) —Pedrolo and Ictineu awards—, Enxarxats (Males Herbes, 2017) —Ictineu Award—, and the short story collection Estimades màquines (Males Herbes, 2020) address ethical dilemmas posed by robotics, artificial intelligence, and social networks. La mutació sentimental has been published in English under the title The Vestigial Heart (MIT Press, 2018), along with materials for teaching a university course on ethics in social robotics and artificial intelligence, which has also been adapted for secondary and high school (Pagés editors, 2018). She is a member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers and the Catalan Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy (SCCFF), as well as Vice President of the CSIC Ethics Committee and a member of the Ethics Observatory in Artificial Intelligence of Catalonia.
Dr. Dietterich (AB Oberlin College 1977; MS University of Illinois 1979; PhD Stanford University 1984) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. Dietterich is one of the pioneers of the field of Machine Learning and has authored more than 220 refereed publications and two books. His current research topics include robust artificial intelligence, robust human-AI systems, and applications in sustainability.
Dietterich is the 2024 recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. Dietterich has also devoted many years of service to the research community and was recently given the ACML Distinguished Contribution and the AAAI Distinguished Service awards. He is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the founding president of the International Machine Learning Society. Other major roles include Executive Editor of the journal Machine Learning, co-founder of the Journal for Machine Learning Research, and program chair of AAAI 1990 and NIPS 2000. He currently oversees the Computer Science categories at arXiv.
Additionally, we will have the participation of other ValgrAI Scientific Council members: Ramon López de Mántaras (president of the Scientific Council), Marco Dorigo, Virginia Dignum, Yolanda Gil, and Georg Gottlob (online). The members of the Scientific Council will lead both the event on July 18 and the subsequent IV Encuentro UMI ValgrAI (ValgrAI JRU Meeting) on July 19, which is also part of the III ValgrAI Scientific Council Forum. This gathering is part of a larger initiative designed to spread knowledge about AI and foster collaboration among students, researchers, companies, and the members of the Scientific Council.
Following the Council’s presentations, we will introduce speakers from our collaborating companies. These organizations are fundamental to the success of the forum and ValgrAI’s activities in general. Their support and collaboration not only make this event possible but also drive the continuous advancement of research and development projects in AI. Their representatives will share success stories, innovative collaborations, and how the partnership with ValgrAI has been a catalyst for technological progress and community well-being.
Agenda
July 18TH – III ValgrAI Scientific Council Forum 2024
9:00 - 9:30 | Registration
Participants will register and receive their event materials. An ideal time to meet other attendees, explore the venue, and prepare for a day full of activities and learning.
9:30 - 10:00 | Welcome
The official welcome to the III ValgrAI Scientific Council Forum 2024 will be delivered by Vicent Botti, General Director of ValgrAI, and Ana Cidad, Managing Director of ValgrAI. Additionally, representatives from Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (UPV) and the Conselleria de Educación, Universidades y Empleo will join them to extend their greetings and highlight the significance of the event in fostering collaboration and innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. An overview of the event, its objectives, and the importance of strategic collaborations in advancing AI research and applications will be presented.
10:00 - 10:45 | KEYNOTE #1 - Hiroaki Kitano | Nobel Turing Challenge: Creating the Engine for Scientific Discovery
Scientific discovery has long been one of the central driving forces in our civilization. It uncovered the principles of the world we live in and has enabled us to invent new technologies reshaping our society, cure diseases, explore unknown new frontiers, and hopefully lead us to build a sustainable planet. Accelerating the speed of scientific discovery is therefore one of the most important endeavors. This requires an in-depth understanding of not only the subject areas but also the nature of scientific discoveries themselves. In other words, the ?science of science? needs to be established and has to be implemented using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to be practically executable. At the same time, what may be implemented by ?AI Scientists? may not resemble the scientific process conducted by human scientists. It may be an alternative form of science that will break the limitation of current scientific practice largely hampered by human cognitive limitation and sociological constraints. It could give rise to a human-AI hybrid form of science that shall bring systems biology and other sciences into the next stage. The Nobel Turing Challenge aims to develop a highly autonomous AI system that can perform top-level science, indistinguishable from the quality of that performed by the best human scientists, where some of the discoveries may be worthy of Nobel Prize level recognition and beyond.
10:45 - 11:15 | AI models for smart cities - EDIC and European Local Digital Twin Toolbox (Ernesto Faubel, Chair de LDT CitiVERSE EDIC, Ajuntament de València; y Patricia Tamarit, Director of EU LDT Toolbox Project, Nunsys)
Europe has created the Digital Program for European cities to take advantage of new technologies. The local digital twin is one of the most powerful tools and it needs creative minds to apply artificial intelligence.
We will have an ocean of data available… Do you want to improve your city with artificial intelligence?
11:15 - 11:45 | Coffee Break
A break for refreshments and networking. Attendees can connect with speakers, researchers, and industry leaders to discuss ideas and form new collaborations in a relaxed environment.
11:45 - 12:45 | The Future of AI: ValgrAI Researchers
Predoctoral and Postdoctoral researchers from ValgrAI will present their doctoral theses. These presentations will showcase cutting-edge research and innovative solutions developed by the next generation of AI researchers, providing a glimpse into the future of AI technology and its applications:
- Aldan Jay (UJI) – Smart Trading Using Technical Analysis on the Crypto Market
- Alejandro Golfe San Martín (UPV) – Enhancing CBIR Performance in Prostate Cancer Diagnosis Through Synthetic Sample Integration
- Antonio Santo (UMH) – Estimation of potentially traversable free zones for autonomous robots
- Carlos Marín (UJI) – AI Techniques Applied to Video Game Technology Development
- Isabel Ferri Molla (UPV) (Ganadora del I Premio ValgrAI a Mejor Trabajo de Final de Máster) – Innovación tecnológica para la autonomía en el hogar de personas dependientes con IA y AR
- Miguel Domingo (UPV) – Advancements in the Application of Neural Machine Translation for the Processing of Historical Documents
- Oscar José Pellicer (UV) (Ganador del I Premio ValgrAI a Mejor Tesis Doctoral) – Explainable Earth Surface Forecasting under Extreme Events
- Pablo Meseguer (UPV) – Few-shot adaptation of vision-language models for slide-level classification of histopathological images
- Sahibzada Saadoon Hammad (UJI) – Anomaly detection based on Artificial Intelligence of Things: A Systematic Literature Mapping
- Salvador López (UJI) – Inspección, Mantenimiento y Reparaciòn de Estructuras Submarinas.
- Victoria Muñoz (UA) – Bias mitigation in corpora for LLMs training applied to text simplification
13:30 - 15:00 | Lunch Break
A break for lunch. Participants can enjoy a meal while networking and discussing the morning’s sessions with fellow attendees.
16:15 - 16:30h | GenAI que funciona: Pangeanic en la Agencia EFE y Agencia Tributaria - Manuel Herranz (CEO en Pangeanic)
16:45 - 17:30h | KEYNOTE #3 - Thomas Dietterich | Integrating machine learning into safety-critical systems
The impressive new capabilities of systems created using deep learning are encouraging engineers to apply these techniques in safety-critical applications such as medicine, aeronautics, and self-driving cars. This talk will discuss the ways that machine learning methodologies are changing to operate in safety-critical systems. These changes include (a) building high-fidelity simulators for the domain, (b) adversarial collection of training data to ensure coverage of the so-called Operational Design Domain (ODD) and, specifically, the hazardous regions within the ODD, (c) methods for verifying that the fitted models generalize well, and (d) methods for estimating the probability of harms in normal operation. There are many research challenges to achieving these. But we must do more, because traditional safety engineering only addresses the known hazards. We must design our systems to detect novel hazards as well. We adopt Leveson’s view of safety as an ongoing hierarchical control problem in which controls are put in place to stabilize the system against disturbances. Disturbances include novel hazards but also management changes such as budget cuts, staff turnover, novel regulations, and so on. Traditionally, it has been the human operators and managers who have provided these stabilizing controls. Are there ways that AI methods, such as novelty detection, near-miss detection, diagnosis and repair, can be applied to help the human organization manage these disturbances and maintain system safety?
17:30 - 17:45h | Farewell and closing
The closing session will summarize the key takeaways from the forum, acknowledge the contributions of speakers and participants, and outline the future directions for ValgrAI. This is an opportunity to reflect on the day’s learnings and the impact of collaborative efforts in advancing AI research and applications.
July 19TH – ValgrAI Joint Research Unit Meeting
Reasons to join us
These reasons highlight the value of the Valgrai Scientific Council Forum 2024 as a must-attend event for those interested in science and technology, especially in the field of artificial intelligence.
Innovative agenda
The forum will feature keynotes from some of the top researchers and companies in the field of science and technology. This means you’ll have the opportunity to hear and learn directly from leading figures who are shaping the future of the industry, sharing their latest findings and innovative insights.
Networking and professional development
It will be an exceptional platform to connect with outstanding talents in artificial intelligence. Additionally, it will serve as an ideal meeting point between companies and students or recent graduates looking to start or boost their professional career in a dynamic and enriching environment
Continuous learning
The forum is an opportunity to update your knowledge and skills. We offer keynote talks, networking time, and brief meetings with collaborating companies. Our focus remains on providing an active learning environment to keep you informed about current trends and emerging technologies.
With the support of…
Co-financed with…
Co-financed with the support of the 2024 Sectoral Events Grant Call in the city of Valencia by the Ayuntamiento de Valencia and the Fundación Las Naves.
