Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Rita Cucchiara

Professor of Engineering

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Director, CINI National Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems (AIIS)

Rita Cucchiara (Electronic Engineering Degree, 1989 – Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the University of Bologna, 1993) is a Full Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in the Department of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari”.  She heads the AImageLab Research Laboratory, gathering more than 30 researchers, working in different research fields of Artificial Intelligence such as Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Deep Learning and Multimedia, applied to surveillance, automotive and robot-human interaction, cultural heritage, and medicine. She heads the co-funded RedVision Lab with UNIMORE and Ferrari and coordinates several research projects with industries.

Currently, she is the Director of the CINI National Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems (AIIS), with the endorsement of the Italian Presidency of Minister Council.  She worked in the group of experts for the Italian AI Strategy with Minister of Economic Development.  She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Institute of Technology.

She was President of the Italian Association CVPL, Italian Chapter of IAPR from 2016 to 2018; she is IAPR Fellow since 2006.  In 2018 she was awarded the “Maria Petrou” for “outstanding research in Pattern recognition and Video Surveillance” and included in the list of 25 women in the world for influencing Robotics by Robothub.  In 2019 she was named fellow of ELLIS (European Labs for Learning and Intelligent Systems).  Having published more than 400 papers, she has been a keynote speaker in many conferences and is very active in scientific dissemination, such as Program Chair of ICCV2017, Area Chair of NeurIPS 2018, 2019, General Chair of the next ICPR2020 in Milano, ACMMM2020 in Seattle and ECCV2022 in Tel Aviv.

Abstract 

Visual Intelligence: Research and Applications for Human-centered AI

Over the past decade, the joined research in Machine Learning and Computer Vision achieved impressive results worldwide, as of the most successful area of Artificial Intelligence.   The capability of understanding images and video content reached new solutions both for autonomous intelligent systems and for an augmenting intelligence of human activities. 

The talk will focus on some aspects of what is called Visual Intelligence for AI-based systems, which mimics the typical human ability to understand the world, predict events, and imagine the possible through the visual perception. In particular, new research results for salient object recognition, attentional analysis and details detection in images will be presented, with reference of some projects carried out at AImagelab, in Italy, together with national and international companies. This visual intelligence capability is directly applicable in different contexts: the prediction of car-driver attention, the robot exploration of unknown environments, the detection of humans with their actions, the automatic description of image content by language as well as a novel way of knowledge extraction from cultural heritage data.  Imagination, creativity, and curiosity-driven behaviour can be transferred to machines, now, and this will be potentially the core of future generations of human-centered AI.

Dr. Jason Matheny

Director

Center for Security & Emerging Technology

Georgetown University

Jason Matheny is founding director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Previously he was Assistant Director of National Intelligence, and Director of IARPA, responsible for the development of breakthrough technologies for the U.S. intelligence community. Before IARPA, he worked at Oxford University, the World Bank, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Center for Biosecurity, and Princeton University, and was the co-founder of two biotechnology companies. He is a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the National Academies’ Intelligence Community Studies Board; is a recipient of the Intelligence Community’s Award for Individual Achievement in Science and Technology, the National Intelligence Superior Service Medal, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers; and was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 50 Global Thinkers.” He has served on various White House committees related to artificial intelligence, biosecurity, high-performance computing, and quantum information science. He co-led the National AI R&D Strategic Plan released by the White House in 2016 and was a member of the White House Select Committee on AI, created in 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University, an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, an MBA from Duke University and a B.A. from the University of Chicago.