Kush R. Varshney of IBM

With the recent rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, we are treating interactions - both helpful and harmful - as behaviors that should be aligned with some notion of human values. In this talk, I will first describe LLMs and their new and amplified risks and harms, such as hallucination, prompt injection, information leakage, copyright infringement, bullying, and gaslighting. Then I will overview the alignment problem and different formulations, including different kinds, horizons, and audiences. I will discuss information-theoretic limits to alignment and present some constructive approaches. I will conclude with some thoughts on value pluralism, moral philosophy, and the decoloniality of knowledge.

Biography:

Kush R. Varshney was born in Syracuse, New York in 1982. He received the B.S. degree (magna cum laude) in electrical and computer engineering with honors from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 2004. He received the S.M. degree in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree
in 2010, both in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. While at MIT, he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Dr. Varshney is an IBM Fellow, based at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he heads the Human-Centered Trustworthy AI team. He was a visiting scientist at IBM Research - Africa, Nairobi, Kenya in 2019. He applies data science and predictive analytics to human capital management, healthcare, olfaction, computational creativity, public affairs, international development, and algorithmic fairness, which has led to the Extraordinary IBM Research Technical Accomplishment for contributions to workforce innovation and enterprise transformation, IBM Corporate Technical Awards for Trustworthy AI and for AI-Powered Employee Journey, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s 2023 Industrial Innovation Award.