AI Institutes Virtual Organization

ICICLE Seminar Series: The Social Implications Of Digital Agricultural Technologies For Small Farmers - What Do We Know And Need To Know About .
2023-08-10 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Speaker: Jenny Melo-Velasco, Ph.D. , Social Scientist, Center for Regenerative Agriculture, University of Missouri
Thursday, August 10, 2023 at Noon ET
Join Zoom Meeting: https://osu.zoom.us/j/98974144548?pwd=[REDACTED]
Abstract: Digital agriculture proposes to revolutionize the processes of production, marketing, and consumption within food systems through the use of tools that collect, store, analyze, and share information digitally. While its proponents emphasize potential benefits, such as improved technical efficiency, resource allocation, and reduced transaction costs, the understanding of the risks and challenges associated with its implementation remains limited. This presentation offers applied scholars and practitioners a practical view to understand key questions on digitalization in agriculture and to organize the main socio-ethical implications that might be considered when promoting digital agricultural technologies.
Bio: Jenny Melo-Velasco is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri. She is also a Visiting Researcher at the Alliance of CIAT and Bioversity, and Cofounder of Huella Delta —a social business based in Colombia, focused on improving market linkages for rural communities. She is an applied researcher interested in inclusive business models and digital agricultural technologies reaching small farmers. Jenny has over thirteen years of experience working with businesses, NGOs, and farmers’ organizations leading knowledge management projects on inclusive business, social innovation, and green businesses. Her work draws from her academic training and experience as a consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur in Colombia and Latin America.

ICICLE Seminar Series: Online Fairness Auditing through Iterative Refinement
2023-07-27 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Presentation Title: Online Fairness Auditing through Iterative Refinement
Time: Jul 27, 2023 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://osu.zoom.us/j/94365864594?pwd=[REDACTED]
Speaker Bio:
Pranav Maneriker is a PhD Candidate at The Ohio State University. His research interests are in natural language processing and graph representation learning with applications to trustworthy computing. His work has been featured in various leading conferences including ACM SIGKDD, EMNLP, and the Web Conference (including a best paper award). Prior to Ohio State, Pranav received his BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and spent a couple of years at Adobe Research. He is a recipient of the 2023 Graduate Research Award at CSE@ The Ohio State University.
Srinivasan Parthasarathy is a Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University. His research interests are broadly in the space of data mining, database systems, network science and high performance computing. A recent focus of his is in the space of responsible data science – where he co-leads a community of practice on this theme. His work has been featured in leading conferences and journals in the field including 15 best paper awards or best-of-conference selections at venues such as VLDB, ACM WWW, ACM WSDM, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, SIAM SDM, ACM BCB and ISMB. Prior to Ohio State Prof. Parthasarathy was at Intel Research and at the University of Rochester (where he received his PhD). Prof. Parthasarathy is a fellow of the IEEE, the Asia Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association and the Risk Institute.
Abstract: A sizable proportion of deployed machine learning models make their decisions in a black-box manner. Such decision-making procedures are susceptible to intrinsic biases, which has led to a call for accountability in deployed decision systems. In this work, we present a first-of-its-kind practical system (AVOIR) for the auditing of (deployed) black-box AI models against various fairness criteria. AVOIR permits the user to flexibly design and specify the fairness criterion (including non-binary and intersectional notions of fairness) they want to audit within a custom domain specific language (DSL). It then relies on the mathematical notion of confidence sets to facilitate the runtime monitoring of probabilistic assertions over said fairness metrics on the corresponding decision functions associated with modern AI models. AVOIR enables the automated inference of probabilistic guarantees and the visual exploration of fairness violations aligned with recent regulatory requirements. In this talk we will describe the AVOIR system and then we will illustrate through case studies how AVOIR can help detect and localize fairness violations and help model designers and ML engineers ameliorate such issues.

ICICLE Seminar Series: "Creation of Climate-Smart and Market-Smart entities using Data-driven, Sky-Earth Convergence"
2023-06-12 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York)
Dr. Srinivasu Pappula Ph.D., CISSP will present “Creation of Climate-Smart and Market-Smart entities using Data-driven, Sky-Earth Convergence” at the ICICLE Seminar Series

Farm Robotics Challenge
2023-06-03 08:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | UC Davis, 1 shields drive, Davis, CA, 95616, United States
As part of AIFS, on Saturday, June 3, 2023, the results of the inaugural Farm Robotics Challenge will be announced. This event will be held on the UC Davis campus. More details forthcoming.

Black Farmers and Regenerative Technology: Past Successes, Current Projects with Implications for the Future
2023-04-18 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Chicago)
Join AIFARMS for our monthly seminar series during the Spring semester on Tuesday, April 18 at 3:00 pm CST to hear from Dr. Raymon Shange, 1890 Extension Administrator, Director of the Carver Integrative Sustainability Center (CISC), and Associate Dean of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Environment and Nutrition Sciences at Tuskegee University, who will be presenting “Black Farmers and Regenerative Technology: Past Successes, Current Projects with Implications for the Future” This event will be virtual.
Seminar link: https://go.illinois.edu/AIFARMSSeminarSeries

AIFS Speaker Series
2023-03-29 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | UC Davis, 1 shields drive, Davis, CA, 95616, United States

SAIL – Summit for AI Institutes Leadership
2022-12-12 08:00 - 2022-12-15 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Asilomar Hotel and Conference Grounds, 800 Asilomar Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA, United States
The NSF and USDA-NIFA funded 18 AI institutes, who are carrying out a broad spectrum of research of critical importance to US competitiveness, food security, public safety and education, and myriad other targets. The 2022 SAIL conference is the inaugural opportunity for significant interactions, discussions, and connections to be built among institutes’ researchers and staff.
