The keynote speaker for the 2020 Awards Ceremony was 
Dr. Yolanda Gil.  Her talk was titled:

“Thoughtful Artificial Intelligence:
Forging A New Partnership for Data Science and
Scientific Discovery”

ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence will play an increasingly prominent role in scientific research ecosystems, and will become indispensable as more interdisciplinary science questions are tackled. While in recent years computers have propelled science by crunching through data and leading to a data science revolution, qualitatively different scientific advances will result from advanced intelligent technologies for crunching through knowledge and ideas. In this talk, I will propose seven principles for developing “thoughtful artificial intelligence”, which will turn intelligent systems into partners for scientists. I will present a personal perspective on a research agenda for thoughtful artificial intelligence, and discuss its potential for data science and scientific discovery.

SPEAKER BIO
Dr. Yolanda Gil is Director for Major Strategic Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Initiatives at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences. She is also Director of the USC Center for Knowledge-Powered Interdisciplinary Data Science. She received her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on artificial intelligence. Her research is on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture and discovery, which she investigates in a variety of projects concerning scientific discovery, knowledge-based planning and problem solving, information analysis and assessment of trust, semantic annotation and metadata, and community-wide development of knowledge bases. Dr. Gil collaborates with scientists in different domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, social knowledge collection, computer-mediated collaboration, and automated discovery.  She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and Past Chair of its Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence. She is also Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and was elected as its 24th President in 2016.

First presented: Online, Sept. 10, 2020

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