Google Award for next generation Deep Learning education

Distinguished Research Professor Mary-Anne Williams is the recipient of an inaugural Google TensorFlow Faculty Award to develop educational content with TensorFlow 2.0, Google’s open-source deep learning platform.

Director of The Magic Lab at UTS, this Award recognises Professor Williams’s position as a senior leader in the Australian and international artificial intelligence (AI) research community. It will provide financial support and technical collaboration with the Google TensorFlow team in Mountain View California to design and develop machine learning experiences, plus Google Cloud credits and access to fast Tensor Processing Units (custom-built computer chips made for machine learning with Big Data).

Professor Williams’ research is transdisciplinary, using human-centric methods from behavioural economics, choice theory, belief revision, machine learning and AI. She leads a team of researchers and students exploring advanced technologies leading to the disruptive adoption of autonomous systems that will transform business and society.

“We are increasingly reliant on the perceptions, decisions and actions of AI, and need to develop trust and confidence in AI, to be sure it is safe and reliable and that its decision – making is transparent, accountable, and trustworthy,” said Professor Williams.

“I am looking forward to working with our students to design responsible AI technologies that people can understand and trust. I will be helping UTS students develop exciting new approaches to eXplainable AI (XAI) by showing them how to use TensorFlow to teach AI to explain itself.”

The highly competitive Award is part of Google’s global program to support academics interested in teaching new, or improving existing, machine learning courses, as well as supporting Faculty working on diversity initiatives.

Marie Eftstathiou leads Google’s work with Australian universities and educators.

“We believe AI is a great tool to help tackle some of the biggest problems of our time and are excited to support Professor Williams and her team to help train Australian AI talent,” she said.

Competing under the name UTS Unleashed! a team from the Magic Lab took first place in the Social Robotics League at RoboCup 2019. This team demonstrated capabilities for human-robot interaction, voice interaction and image recognition that can develop the social behaviours and foundational skills that allow robots to see, hear, follow and talk to people using fluent multimodal robot-human communication, language, lights, sound, and gestures.

###