Yoshua Bengio

Long term, I'm really interested in thinking of how we can instill moral values into computers.

Obviously, this is not something we'll achieve in the next five or 10 years.

There's already work in detecting emotions, for example, in images, in sounds, in texts, and also studying how different agents interacting differently.

in different ways may correspond to patterns of say injustice which could trigger anger so these are things we can do in in the medium term and eventually train computers to model for example how humans react emotionally

I would say the simplest thing is unfair situations which trigger anger.

This is one of the most basic emotions that we share with other animals.

I think it's quite feasible within the next few years so we can build systems that can detect these kinds of things to the extent, unfortunately, that they understand enough about the world around us, which is a long time away.

But maybe we can initially do this in virtual environments.

So you can imagine like a video game.

Mm-hmm.

where agents interact in some ways and then some situations trigger an emotion, I think we could train machines to detect those situations and predict that the particular emotion will likely be felt if a human was playing one of the characters.

Yes, I think it's an important subject.

Reducing it to annotation may be useful for somebody building a system tomorrow, but longer term, the process of teaching...

I think it's something that deserves a lot more attention from the machine learning community.

So there are people who have coined the term machine teaching.

So what are good strategies for teaching a learning agent?

And can we design, train a system that is going to be a good teacher?

So in my group, we have a project called

called BBI or BBI game where there is a game or scenario where there's a learning agent and a teaching agent presumably the teaching agent would eventually be a human but we're not there yet and the role of the teacher is to use its knowledge of the environment which it can acquire using whatever way brute force

to help the learner learn as quickly as possible.