The past three years have seen a rapid growth of generative AI (GenAI) technology. Several multi-modal large language models have been developed such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Sora, etc. They have demonstrated an impressive capability of generating contents and performing a wide range of natural language processing tasks including reasoning, programming, even producing images and video clips from text instructions. It is widely perceived that the technology is rapidly advancing towards an artificial general intelligence and will fundamentally change the world by revolutionise the ways we work and live. The panel invited a few active researchers from the academics and practitioners from the industry. Each panellist will give a short position statement to present their visions on the fol-lowing issues related to generative AI.
- The directions that GenAI would move forward, including the applications in both short and long terms.
- The impacts that GenAI would make on our society, especially, the benefits and risks that GenAI could bring with.
- The challenges that it will confront both researchers and practitioners, particularly, how to monitor, detect, evaluate prevent, and minimise the risks.
As usual, the audiences will engage in the panel discussion to raise their concerns, express their opinions, and ask questions to the panellists. As a novel features of the panel, we will employ ChatGPT also to answer the questions as a virtual panellist.
Panellist
Prof. Hong Zhu (Moderator)
Oxford Brookes Univ., UK
Dr. Hong Zhu is a professor of computer science at the Ox-ford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, where he chairs the Cloud Computing and Cybersecurity Research Group. His research interests are in software development methodolo-gies, recently focusing on cloud-native and machine learn-ing software engineering. He has published 2 books and more than 200 research papers in journals and international conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of British Computer Society, and ACM.
Prof. Xiaoli Li
Inst. for Infocomm Research, Singapore
Dr. Xiaoli Li is currently a principal scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore. He is also the department head of the Machine Intellection department, which consists of 100+ AI and data scientists. It is the larg-est AI and data science group in Singapore. He has also held an adjunct professor position at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for 6 years. He is an IEEE Fellow and Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA). Xiaoli is also serving as KPMG-I2R joint lab co-director. He has been a member of Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC) from ESG Singapore and In-focomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) since 2020. Moreover, he serves as a health innovation expert panel member for the Ministry of Health (MOH), expert panel member for Ministry of Education (MOE), as well as an AI advisor for the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO), Prime Minister’s Office, highlighting his exten-sive involvement in key Government and industry initia-tives.
Prof. Junhua Ding
University of North Texas, USA
Dr. Junhua Ding is the Reinburg Endowed Professor in Data Science at the University of North Texas (UNT), where he focuses on data science research and education. His current research areas include data quality, automated software en-gineering, and biomedical computation. His work aims to enhance the understanding and implementation of data management, quality assurance, and the application of com-putational and learning techniques to legal and biomedical fields. Before joining UNT in 2018, he held academic posi-tions at East Carolina University and worked as a Senior Engineer at Johnson & Johnson and a Software Engineer at Beckman Coulter Inc.
Dr. Emese Bari
Visa Inc., USA
Dr. Emese Bari is the Vice President at Visa Inc, USA, since January 2017, where she leads the Digital and Mobile Soft-ware Development department. She manages mobile engi-neering, Java platform development, web application devel-opment, test engineering, performance engineering and in-tegration solutions of mobile payment applications. She is also a part time professor at Notre Dame de Namur Univer-sity, CA, USA. Prior to Visa, she was Vice President of En-gineering Solutions at Flexton Inc, USA, where she led the Engineering Solutions department and was responsible for planning and delivering custom software solutions to the clients, among them LinkedIn, Walmart, Stubhub, etc. Dr. Bari also worked for 4 years as the Director of Global Solu-tions Engineering and Customer Quality at PayPal, and 8 years as QA Director at eBay, and has many other industry experiences at VeriSign, InsWeb and Aeroflot Int’l Airlines, etc. Her current research interests are artificial intelligence in software error detection, test automation solutions in the mobile space and error prevention in globally scalable fault tolerant software programs.
Dr. Yang Liu
MeiTuan.com, China
Dr. Yang Liu is currently employed by MeiTuan as Director of QA since 2021. He leads the team that looks after the logistic systems in Best Select business, which is an e-commerce platform with around 10 million orders per day. Before MeiTuan, he led the QA team at Booking.com, where he drove multiple test automation projects and devel-oped the quality strategy for the accommodation business unit. Yang also has experiences at National Australia Bank, IRESS, Alibaba and Baidu. His team has built partnership with research teams including Oxford Brookes University, University of Wollongong, Beijing University of Aero-nautics and Astronautics, Kristiania University College and University of Oulu. He is interested in quality engineering of machine learning, model-based software testing, test case automatic generation and technical debt detection.
ChatGPT (Virtual Panellist)
OpenAI, USA.
ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on large language models (LLMs), it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive user prompts and replies are considered at each conversation stage as context. ChatGPT is credited with starting the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of AI. By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to the growth of OpenAI’s current valuation of $86 billion. ChatGPT’s release spurred the release of competing products, including Gemini, Claude, Llama, Ernie, and Grok. ([1])
[1] The introduction to ChatGPT is from WikiPedia.