September 8
@
4:00 PM
–
5:00 PM
Scaling Earthly AI to Help Children with Speech and Language Service Needs
Abstract:
We are standing on the brink of an extraordinary transformation. Artificial intelligence is not just a reshaping technology, it also reshapes possibility. Yet even as this technological renaissance accelerates, our society faces many deep and urgent challenges. For example, nearly 3.4 million children in the U.S. require speech and language services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and are at risk of falling behind in their academic and social-emotional development without timely intervention by Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs). Unfortunately, there is a significant shortage of SLPs, making it almost impossible for SLPs to provide individualized services for children. Through the recently established National AI Institute for Exceptional Education, we envision a transformative approach to address this challenge. We aim to develop advanced AI technologies to scale SLPs’ availability and services. In this talk, I will discuss the rationale behind the Institute’s vision, the technical approaches we are taking, and the corresponding research challenges we must overcome. I will contextualize these efforts in an ultimate research goal of transforming the current AI innovation ecosystem to truly democratize AI for a better society. This also opens up new opportunities for collaboration with a broad research community in areas of foundational AI, workload acceleration, system characterization and optimization, and AI automation.
Jinjun Xiong
Bio:
Dr. Jinjun Xiong is founding dean of the College of AI, Cyber and Computing at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UT San Antonio), and holds the Microsoft President’s Endowed Professorship with the Department of Computer Science and Department of Computer Engineering. Dr. Xiong also serves as the Scientific Director for the $20 million National AI Institute for Exceptional Education, and the AI lead for the $10 million IES Center for Early Literacy and Responsible AI. Prior to UT San Antonio, Dr. Xiong was Empire Innovation Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo (UB), Director for the UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, and Senior Researcher and Program Director for AI and Hybrid Clouds Systems at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He was the former co-founder and co-director for the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR), the success of which in 5 years has led to the 10-year $200M expansion of the center to the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute. His research interests are on across-stack AI systems research, including AI applications, algorithms, tooling and computer architectures. Many of his research results have been adopted in IBM’s products and tools. He published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in top AI conferences and systems conferences. His publication won 9 Best Paper Awards and 10 Nominations for Best Paper Awards. He also won top awards from various international competitions, including the championship award for the IEEE GraphChallenge on accelerating sparse neural networks in 2020, and the First Place Awards for the 2019 DAC Systems Design Contest on designing an object detection neural network for edge FPGA and GPU devices, respectively.