Sensory Interventions: Real-time integration of passive sensing and adaptive passive interventions

Thursday, February 3, 2022

Abstract:
The proliferation of mobile and IoT devices and the development of passive sensing methods have revolutionized the way we collect information about people’s lives. By leveraging sensors, it is now possible to detect various behavioral patterns, including physical activities, sleep, emotions, and social interactions. Although there has been much attention to the role of passive methods of data collection and analysis, another essential component has not received the same level of attention: passive interventions. Currently, the state of the art of interventions relies on active participation of the user, either by presenting feedback for the user to reflect about their behavior or mood, or by sending just-in-time messages to prompt the user to take an action. Despite the increasing usage and appeal of these approaches, they also have a limitation: they require significant attention and effort from users to be effective. Many interventions, for instance, prompt users to direct their attention to the technologies, which can interrupt people’s current activities and compromise their task performance. Because of these issues, it becomes harder to “close the loop”, so mobile technologies effectively capture relevant information about people’s lives, but the data collected often does not lead to improvements in people’s behavior or emotions. In this talk, I will present the work ongoing in the People Aware Computing lab around sensory interventions which deliver seamless passive interventions in real-time in response to users’ behavioral state.

Bio:
Tanzeem Choudhury is a Professor of Computing and Information Sciences at Cornell Tech where she holds the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair in Integrated Health and Technology. She is the Senior Vice President of Digital Health at Optum Labs and is a co-founder of HealthRhythms Inc, a company whose mission is to add the layer of behavioral health into all of healthcare. At Cornell, she directs the People-Aware Computing group, which focuses on innovating the future of technology-assisted well-being. The group's research in sensing-to-intervention is helping transform healthcare from a reactive to proactive system. Tanzeem received her PhD from the Media Laboratory at MIT and her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Rochester. She has been awarded the MIT Technology Review TR35 award, NSF CAREER award, TED Fellowship, Kavli Fellowship, ACM Distinguished Membership, and Ubiquitous Computing 10-year Impact Award.

For more information, please visit: http://pbh.tech.cornell.edu

AI Agents May Cooperate Better if They Don't Resemble Us

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Abstract:
AI systems control an ever growing part of our world. As a result, they will increasingly interact with each other directly, with little or no potential for human mediation. If each system stubbornly pursues its own objectives, this runs the risk of familiar game-theoretic tragedies – along the lines of the Tragedy of the Commons, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or even the Traveler’s Dilemma – in which outcomes are reached that are far worse for every party than what could have been achieved cooperatively.

However, AI agents can be designed in ways that make them fundamentally unlike strategic human agents. This approach is often overlooked, as we are usually inspired by our own human condition in the design of AI agents. But I will argue that this approach has the potential to avoid the above tragedies in new ways. The price to pay for this, for us as researchers, is that many of our intuitions about game and decision theory, and even belief formation, start to fall short. I will discuss how foundational research from the philosophy and game theory literatures provides a good starting point for pursuing this approach.

This talk covers joint work with Caspar Oesterheld, Scott Emmons, Andrew Critch, Stuart Russell, Abram Demski, Yuan Deng, and Catherine Moon.

Recommended reading: paper related to the talk; Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab site.

Bio:
Vincent Conitzer is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Distinguished University Professor of New Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is about to move to Carnegie Mellon University. He is also Head of Technical AI Engagement at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy, at the University of Oxford. He received Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Conitzer works on artificial intelligence (AI). Much of his work has focused on AI and game theory, for example designing algorithms for the optimal strategic placement of defensive resources. More recently, he has started to work on AI and ethics: how should we determine the objectives that AI systems pursue, when these objectives have complex effects on various stakeholders?

Conitzer has received the 2021 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, an NSF CAREER award, the inaugural Victor Lesser dissertation award, an honorable mention for the ACM dissertation award, and several awards for papers and service at the AAAI and AAMAS conferences. He has also been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, a Bass Fellow, an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and one of AI's Ten to Watch. He has served as program and/or general chair of the AAAI, AAMAS, AIES, COMSOC, and EC conferences. Conitzer and Preston McAfee were the founding Editors-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC).