NeurIPS 2018 Day 3: Reproducibility, Robustness, and Robot Racism

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Some brief notes from day 3 of NeurIPS 2018. Previous notes here: Expo Tutorials Day 2.

Reproducible, Reusable, and Robust Reinforcement Learning (Professor Joelle Pineau)

I was sad to miss this talk, but lots of people told me it was great so I’ve bookmarked it to watch later.

Investigations into the Human-AI Trust Phenomenon (Professor Ayanna Howard)

A few interesting points in this talk:

• Children are unpredictable, and working with data generated from experiments with children can be hard. (for example, children will often try to win at games in unexpected ways)
• Automated vision isn’t perfect, but in many cases it’s better than the existing baseline (having a human record certain measurements) and can be very useful.
• Having robots show sadness or disappointment turns out to be much more effective than anger for changing a child’s behaviour.
• Humans seem to inherently trust robots!

Two cool experiments:

To what extent would people trust a robot in a high-stakes emergency situation?

A research subject is led into a room by a robot, for a yet-to-be-defined experiment. The…