ADAPT Research Centre launches collaborative program on Artificial Intelligence – #DiscussAI

The Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Research Centre has launched #DiscussAI, an innovative and collaborative program of public events about Artificial Intelligence and how this ground-breaking technology impacts our lives and society.

The programme provides communities with the opportunity to meet with AI researchers, pose questions on the role of AI in society, and help generate ideas for new research. The program launched September 3^rd with the #DiscussAI information session.

Artificial Intelligence – #DiscussAI

Through the #DiscussAI programme, ADAPT researchers seek to engage communities and individuals across the country in conversations that raise and answer questions, and generate ideas for new research. The program is set to run from September until December with four events taking place each month.

These events include:

• September 9^th: Citizens’ Think-In
• September 21^st: Debunked
• September 23^rd: Citizens’ Think-In
• October 7^th: Citizens’ Think-In
• October 13^th: Debunked
• October 14^th: ADAPT @ BIAS
• October 19^th: Debunked
• November 8^th: AILO
• November 10^th: Debunked
• November 11^th: Citizens’ Think-In
• November 30^th: Citizens’ Think-In

ADAPT in the news

ADAPT’s Ben Cowen recently featured in an article titled “AI helps chatbots to get better at chat, which helps us all” on topic of conversational AI, explaining how the next stage of development will be chatbots designed to be proactive.

ADAPT recently hosted two major international conferences on different areas of AI: The 32nd Hypertext and Social Media Conference (30 August – 2 September) and 29th EUSIPCO Conference on Signal Processing (23 – 27 August). These are the biggest conferences in their respective fields, attracting delegates from all over the world.

Research and Collaboration

The SFI ADAPT Centre has created the AI Community Club, a platform designed to bring AI enthusiasts, researchers and leaders together ‘virtually’ to boost collective innovation. The AI Community Club provides a central location for the numerous communities and initiatives that exist to explore the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

ADAPT researcher, Bruno Andrade at Munster Technological University, partnered with other researchers and international collaborators to study link how the composition of microorganisms that live in the upper respiratory tract changed in the presence of the C-19 virus using state-of-art machine learning and computational biology approaches.

New research conducted by Professor Ben Cowan and Dr Justin Edwards of ADAPT at UCD aims to inform the design of proactive digital agents to develop the digital assistants of the future. The paper, titled “Eliciting Spoken Interruptions to Inform Proactive Speech Agent Design”, was presented at the 3rd Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) conference this summer.

A research paper published recently used social opinion datasets as a basis to explore new methods for opinion mining online content. The paper, written by ADAPT researcher Keith Cortis along with Professor Brian Davis of the SFI ADAPT Centre, uses three high-quality social opinion datasets related to Malta’s annual Government Budgets of 2018, 2019 and 2020 to explore the sentiment and opinions in the content.

For more information or to register for an event visit here:

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Prepared by Shane Leonard