DESCRIPTION
Graphical User Interfaces gave everyone the ability to perform a variety of tasks on our computers and through the web. Even complicated tasks could be split into a series of simple point-and-click actions. This apparently empowered us and freed us from intermediaries. However, through time, this was turned against us by companies which assigned to us tasks that were performed by their employees. As we work for these companies without being paid, we have become digital slaves, especially in the case when services are poorly designed and require us to learn to overcome their idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately efforts at software engineering solutions for services integration have failed. AI personal assistants may come to our rescue. They can be trained on how to use the web interfaces and to combine multiple services in order to fulfill our intent expressed through natural language. I will present the design of a personal web assistant relying on a multimodal LLM. Finally, I will present a survey of agentic frameworks that enable the creation of autonomous agents capable of making decisions and taking actions based on user inputs or general rules.
DETAILS
Course type: Invited lecture
Institution of lecturer: University of Pisa
LECTURER
Prof. Giuseppe Attardi
Short CV: Giuseppe Attardi is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. For 45 years he worked on Artificial Intelligence and related technologies. In the 1970s he worked at the AI Lab at MIT, then at the Sony Paris Research Laboratory, at ICSI in Berkeley and at Yahoo Research Barcelona. He developed Omega, a logic for knowledge representation; ECL, a version of the Lisp language for AI; CMM, the memory manager used in the Java programming language; DeSR, a parser for natural language; WikiExtractor, used to build language models from Wikipedia texts. He participated in the development of Arianna, the first Italian search engine. He is the founder or partner of several startups, in Italy and Spain. He promoted Internet usage in Italy and helped creating the fiber optic networks of the University of Pisa and the GARR national research network. He developed the GARR cloud platform. He designed the Green Datacenter and the exam registration system of the University of Pisa. He contributed to the drafting of the Italian strategy on Artificial Intelligence and to the creation of the first national doctorate in Artificial Intelligence.