Towards Societal Impact of AI

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have shown great success in many areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, and knowledge discovery. However, AI research to deliver social benefits and impacts is less explored while imminent needed. Guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, my research involves the development of advanced AI techniques, in particular Deep Graph Learning (DGL), to address the grand societal challenges and further apply them to various social good applications for improving our society and people’s daily life, namely DGL for Social Good (DGL4SG). Achieving the goal is not easy since challenges come from the increasing complexity of many factors including problems, data, and techniques, which require long-term and concentrated effort. DGL presents a good opportunity to build better solutions and tools due to its strong capability in learning and inferring graph data which is ideal for modeling many real-world social good systems. Fortunately, I have been working on DGL with continued contributions and impacts since my graduate study. The special research experience lifts me up to a unique position for conducting research that intersects AI, DGL, and social good, and pushing the field of DGL4SG forward.