Announcing the October meeting of the WA Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia. Our guest speaker is Dr Caren Han of The University of Western Australia.

Date: Tuesday, 10 October 2023
Time: 6:00PM
Location: Blakers Lecture Theatre, The University of Western Australia.

Presentation

Large Language Models, and Multi-Modalities

Dr Caren Han, The University of Western Australia

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of analysing and generating text. They are trained on a vast amount of textual data to enhance their performance in tasks like text generation and even programming. Most current LLMs mainly focus on text processing. However, humans normally communicate and understand the situation via multimodality. 

Multimodal LLMs combine other data types, such as images, videos, audio, and other sensory inputs, along with the text. The integration of multimodality into LLMs addresses some of the limitations of current text-only models and opens up possibilities for new applications that were previously impossible.

In this project, we will go through how the trends and limitations of large language models and introduce a way to make trustable LLMs with multimodality.

About the Speaker

Dr Caren Han is currently co-leader of AD-NLP (Australia Deep Learning NLP Group) and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia and an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and the University of Edinburgh, U.K.

Her research expertise lies in Natural Language Processing, encompassing areas such as multi-modal (Visual-Linguistic) Learning, Explainable and Refinable NLP, sentiment analysis, abusive language detection, dialogue systems, and natural language understanding. This research interest has led her to successfully secure more than 5 million dollars in international and national research and industry grants. Over the last 5 years, she has published in 42 top-tier international ERA A* and A conferences, including receiving recognitions such as the Best Paper award (ICONIP 2020 - ERA A) and Best Area Paper award (COLING 2020 - ERA A).

She is the winner of several teaching awards and research awards, including Teacher of the Year 2020, Australia Young Achiever 2017, Supervisor of the Year 2021, and Early Career Research Award (Physics, Math, and Computing) 2023. In addition, she was chosen as a Teaching Champion, a distinction bestowed to only one individual in the engineering faculty, at the University of Sydney in 2022.

Refreshments and Dinner

Members, visitors, and guests are invited to mingle over wine and cheese from 5:30PM.

Following the meeting you are invited to dine with the speaker and fellow attendees at a local restaurant.

Meeting directions

The Blakers Lecture Theatre is located on the ground floor of the Mathematics building at The University of Western Australia. Its entrance is on the northern side of the building. See: Campus Map, Google Maps.

Parking is free on the UWA Crawley campus after 5:00PM. A convenient place to park is Car Park 18 accessible from Fairway Entry 1.

For further information please contact the WA Branch Secretary (ssa.wa.secretary@gmail.com).