Randy Goebel

Professor of Computing Science, University of Alberta (Canada)

R.G. (Randy) Goebel is currently professor of Computing Science in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Associate Vice President (Research & Innovation), Associate Vice President (Academic), and Fellow and co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII). Randy is a member of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy steering committee, and on several advisory boards, including the scientific advisory board of the German Research Centre for AI (DFKI), and the Japanese Science and Technology agency CREST program. A thread of Randy's current work is to articulate the tradeoff between intelligent autonomous systems and intelligent infrastructure, and to develop explainable reinforcement learning (XRL), prediction as knowledge systems (PAK) in support of autonomous regulatory compliance (ARC).

At the frontier of AI Application: balancing technology push and application pull

September 03 11:45 am - 1:00 pm (CEST)

The pace at which AI theory is being delivered to application has accelerated in the last decade, creating some impressive value in some areas (e.g., health and legal informatics, manufacturing, supply chain management), but raising warning flags about trust and ethics.

Both the promise and the challenges are evident in the application of AI to automotives and automated autonomous systems, especially in the choice of technologies, tradeoffs in where intelligence is required (i.e., the autonomous system or the infrastructure), and the emerging role of explainable AI, both in improving the transparency, trust, and robustness of systems, and in informing social systems and regulators about how to confirm their safety.

We try to highlight salient aspects of these challenges, and provide some context for helping to manage the translation of AI theory to application.