ADMU Social Computing Lab made history with NAIST for First Cross-Cultural Workshop

The Ateneo Social Computing Science Laboratory, which is led by Ma. Regina Justina E Estuar, PhD, has spearheaded the first-ever Ateneo NAIST Cross-Cultural Workshop on Perspectives in Social Computing Research on 13 October 2023 at the PLDT-Convergent Technologies Center (CTC) Building of the Ateneo de Manila University. Despite the longstanding partnership between the Ateneo and Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), this is the initial formal event that provided an intellectual avenue to share ideas within the realm of technological implications and consequences in our society.

The event began with Dr. Estuar sharing the past accomplishments, current status, and future vision of the laboratory which she started in 2012 with Marlene M de Leon, PhD. Their aspirations grew quickly, and it got incorporated with other research entities of the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS),which subsequently became under the umbrella body of the Ateneo Center for Computing Competency and Research (ACCCRe).

Their most notable work was in partnership with the Commission of Higher Education (CHED) and the University of California System through the Philippine California Advanced Research Institutes (PCARI) Project. Dr. Estuar was the project leader of one of the primary initiatives of the endeavor, which enabled the early detection of plant diseases for farmers through wireless sensors paired with a user friendly mobile app. From here, the work evolved to epidemiological modelling, and natural language processing-inspired research activities.

Then, Eiji Aramaki, PhD, a representative from NAIST, shared his current work of aligning sentiment analysis schemes in the medical field. In his view, he highlighted how social media activity in Japan is related to the past major health crisis the country faced. These include the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the recent coronavirus disease pandemic. Upon the wave of increasing interdisciplinary fields on social computing, he stressed the need for further collaboration, especially those in the Global South.

The plenary discussion on the rise of large language models (LLMs) commenced in the afternoon portion with Gina Romero, Rachel Editha Roxas, PhD, and Erika Fille T Legara, PhD as the invited guest speakers. Romero, who is the Founder and Project Head at Connected Women, shared that upskilling Filipino women through meaningful work online is crucial to adapt the fast-paced nature of today’s burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI). They bolstered over 1000 women who were recipients of the training they gave in AI data annotation. These include image, video, and text annotation depending on its respective contexts. She emphasized that this skill is in demand since a lot of companies are looking for ways to upgrade their infrastructure through training their machine learning models.

Dr. Roxas presented the unique advantages and challenges of the use of LLMs, especially on the lens of research work. The topic of LLMs has grown vastly since its first literature review in 1996. Based on the current trends, there is a 7.7% annual growth rate of academic work solely on why and how LLMs are being implemented. What is even more interesting is that 96% of the research was published after 2020. She supplemented the discussion with having a sense of urgency on members of the academe to probe further the ethical dilemmas surrounding it. Some of the underlying concerns were accessibility challenges, overreliance on LLMs which may hinder critical thinking, and the copyright issues of reproducing or generating original work.

To end, Dr. Legara lectured on the ethical use of these general AI models. The foundation why it is harmful to use personal information as a prompt to such LLMs is the concern for privacy and security. She reiterated the lack of consent on using opensource programming codes as a means to train the respective model. This again begs the question of blurry lines of copyrighted works. Other major issues include: bias and fairness, and making up synthetic information about the topic. She then stressed on the importance of knowing what is happening under the hood of these models is vital for how they were being trained.

Participants of the workshop were able to discuss in simple group sessions about what they have learned from the event. The facilitators of each group were the previous and current graduate students of the Social Computing Laboratory.

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Text: Michael Lopez II

Photos Courtesy of the Ateneo Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS)