Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, Director of MCL, attended the IEEE Conference on Multimedia Exposition (ICME) held in Niagara Falls, Canada, from July 15-19, 2024. Professor Kuo had dual roles in this conference as a Panel co-Chair and a keynote speaker. Professor Kuo gave his keynote on 7/18 (Thursday) on “Toward Interpretable and Sustainable AI via Green Learning.” Besides, Dr. Kuo and Dr. Zicheng Liu of AMD organized a panel as summarized below.

Panel Title: Generative AI – Opportunities, Challenges, and Open Questions

Panel Background: Generative AI has received a lot of attention due to the tremendous success of ChapGPT. Large foundation models have been trained, leading to various demos and potential applications such as text-to-image and text-to-video cross-domain generations. Resources have been invested in building massive computational and storage infrastructures. Furthermore, data collection and cleaning are essential to high system performance. In the face of these rapid developments, this panel will discuss opportunities, challenges, and open questions associated with generative AI.

Four panelists were invited:

  • Rogerio Feris, IBM Research
  • Lijuan Wang, Microsoft Research
  • Jiebo Luo, University of Rochester
  • Junsong Yuan, State University of New York at Buffalo

Q&A topics:

  • Today’s generative AI is tilted more toward “engineering” than “science.” Will this be a concern in the long run?
  • What are the major shortcomings of the current large foundation models?
  • How vital are “data collection and cleaning” tasks in generative AI? How do large companies carry out such tasks? Will we run out of data? If so, how soon?
  • Will “copyright,” “plagiarism,” and “hallucination” be issues? How can we address them? How can we trust the answers?
  • What roles can small AI companies and academia with limited resources play?
  • What is the future R&D direction of generative AI? What will be the next big breakthroughs?

Dr. Kuo also had a boat tour to see Niagara Falls nearby. He said, “It was a very unique, exciting, and memorable experience.”