Brando Benifei– Member of the European Parliament
Tuesday, November 26th, 2024 – 16.30-17.30
BIO: Brando Benifei is an Italian MEP serving his third term in the European Parliament. During the previous mandate he was co-Rapporteur for the Artificial Intelligence Act and thanks to this work in March 2024 he won the prize for the Best MEP of the Mandate assigned by The Parliament Magazine. Now he is Coordinator in the Committee on International Trade for the Socialists and Democrats Group and Chair of the European Parliament’s D-US delegation. He is a member of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and he also works as a substitute member on the EU internal market and consumer protection and on legal affairs, always following closely digital issues
Title
“The European AI Act: Challenges and opportunities for ethical and responsible artificial intelligence“
Abstract
The Artificial Intelligence Act, which came into force on 1 August 2024, represents the world’s first comprehensive regulatory framework on artificial intelligence. This talk examines the main provisions of the AI Act, analysing its risk-based approach and the implications for developers, vendors and users of AI systems. Implementation challenges will be discussed, with a focus on requirements for high-risk systems and prohibited practices. The opportunities the AI Act offers to promote responsible innovation, increase consumer trust and establish global standards for ethical AI will also be explored. Finally, the potential impact of the AI Act beyond EU borders and its role in shaping the future of AI governance internationally will be reflected upon.
Valerio Basile – Assistant Professor at the University of Turin, Italy
Wednesday, November 27th, 2024 – 10.30-11.30
BIO: Valerio Basile is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin, Italy, and a member of the Content-centered Computing group and the Hate Speech Monitoring group. His work spans several areas such as formal representations of meaning, linguistic annotation, natural language generation, commonsense knowledge, semantic parsing, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, perspectives and bias in supervised machine learning, from data creation to system evaluation. He is currently the PI of the project BREAKhateDOWN “Toxic Language Understanding in Online Communication”, and among the main proponents of the Perspectivist Data Manifesto.
Title
“Modeling and Evaluation for Perspectivist NLP”
Abstract
A recent line of research in NLP proposes to never aggregate human annotations [1], but rather to leverage the worth of knowledge found in label variation for building models [2] and evaluating them [3]. This approach is particularly relevant when dealing with highly subjective aspects of natural language such as irony or undesirable language.
In this talk, I will present the perspectivist paradigm in NLP, and the results of recent and ongoing research focusing on building perspective-aware predictive models and automatically extract human perspectives from annotated data. Particular emphasis will be given to language resources, for training or few-shotting models, but also for benchmarking in the perspectivist framework.