Canada

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to permeate various aspects of societies, understanding the disparities in AI knowledge and skills across different living areas becomes imperative. This study investigates the digital and AI skills gaps in the context of small and large European living areas, shedding light on the potential hindrances to unleashing the full economic and social potentials of these regions in an AI-enabled economy.
Small living areas have emerged as significant contributors to Europe&#39;s economy, offering an alternative to the bustling environment of larger cities for those seeking an improved quality of life. Nonetheless, they often encounter challenges related to digital infrastructure, access to financial resources, and digital skills gaps, limiting their economic and social growth prospects.
Drawing from a comprehensive dataset encompassing over 4,000 respondents across eight EU countries, this research examines the current perceptions and understandings of AI and digital skills within two distinct population groups: residents of smaller living areas and their counterparts in larger communities. Through bivariate analysis, notable insights are revealed concerning trust in AI solutions and entities, self-assessed digital skills, AI awareness, and attitudes in both population groups.
The findings indicate that individuals residing in smaller living areas exhibit lower trust in AI solutions and entities, alongside diminished self-perceived digital skills in comparison to those in larger communities. Notably, no significant disparities are observed in AI awareness, attitude, and self-assessed AI skills between the two groups.
Further examination of key demographic variables, including age, gender, and education, underscores intriguing relationships between these variables and AI-related perceptions and skills. In living areas with populations less than 30,000, digital skills exhibit associations with all measured variables, while gender and education correlate with specific facets of trust in AI solutions and entities. Age groups demonstrate connections solely with trust in AI solutions and entities, whereas education reveals relationships with all variables except trust in AI solutions.
On the other hand, in larger living areas, where populations are of more than 30,000, digital skills exhibit similar relationships with all measured variables, and gender again influences trust in AI solutions. Interestingly, age groups exclusively correlate with AI attitudes and trust in AI solutions and entities, omitting a link to AI awareness. Additionally, education displays connections with all variables except trust in AI solutions, mirroring patterns observed in smaller communities.
These insights underscore the significance of addressing digital and AI skills gaps in fostering growth and preparedness for the AI-driven future. As AI becomes increasingly integral to various aspects of society, targeted interventions and policies are essential to bridge these gaps and enable individuals and communities to harness the transformative potential of AI-enabled economies.

AAAI 2024

Addressing Digital and AI Skills Gaps in European Living Areas: A Comparative Analysis of Small and Large Communities

policy implications

ai awareness

ai trust

ai attitudes

ai skills

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to permeate various aspects of societies, understanding the disparities in AI knowledge and skills across different living areas becomes imperative. This study investigates the digital and AI skills gaps in the context of small and large European living areas, shedding light on the potential hindrances to unleashing the full economic and social potentials of these regions in an AI-enabled economy.
Small living areas have emerged as significant contributors to Europe's economy, offering an alternative to the bustling environment of larger cities for those seeking an improved quality of life. Nonetheless, they often encounter challenges related to digital infrastructure, access to financial resources, and digital skills gaps, limiting their economic and social growth prospects.
Drawing from a comprehensive dataset encompassing over 4,000 respondents across eight EU countries, this research examines the current perceptions and understandings of AI and digital skills within two distinct population groups: residents of smaller living areas and their counterparts in larger communities. Through bivariate analysis, notable insights are revealed concerning trust in AI solutions and entities, self-assessed digital skills, AI awareness, and attitudes in both population groups.
The findings indicate that individuals residing in smaller living areas exhibit lower trust in AI solutions and entities, alongside diminished self-perceived digital skills in comparison to those in larger communities. Notably, no significant disparities are observed in AI awareness, attitude, and self-assessed AI skills between the two groups.
Further examination of key demographic variables, including age, gender, and education, underscores intriguing relationships between these variables and AI-related perceptions and skills. In living areas with populations less than 30,000, digital skills exhibit associations with all measured variables, while gender and education correlate with specific facets of trust in AI solutions and entities. Age groups demonstrate connections solely with trust in AI solutions and entities, whereas education reveals relationships with all variables except trust in AI solutions.
On the other hand, in larger living areas, where populations are of more than 30,000, digital skills exhibit similar relationships with all measured variables, and gender again influences trust in AI solutions. Interestingly, age groups exclusively correlate with AI attitudes and trust in AI solutions and entities, omitting a link to AI awareness. Additionally, education displays connections with all variables except trust in AI solutions, mirroring patterns observed in smaller communities.
These insights underscore the significance of addressing digital and AI skills gaps in fostering growth and preparedness for the AI-driven future. As AI becomes increasingly integral to various aspects of society, targeted interventions and policies are essential to bridge these gaps and enable individuals and communities to harness the transformative potential of AI-enabled economies.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Recently, the rise of large-scale vision-language pretrained models like CLIP, coupled with the technology of Parameter-Efficient FineTuning (PEFT), has captured substantial attraction in video action recognition. Nevertheless, prevailing approaches tend to prioritize strong supervised performance at the expense of compromising the models' generalization capabilities during transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel Multimodal, Multi-task CLIP adapting framework named M2-CLIP to address these challenges, preserving both high supervised performance and robust transferability.
Firstly, to enhance the individual modality architectures, we introduce multimodal adapters to both the visual and text branches. Specifically, we design a novel visual TED-Adapter, that performs global Temporal Enhancement and local temporal Difference modeling to improve the temporal representation capabilities of the visual encoder. Moreover, we adopt text encoder adapters to strengthen the learning of semantic label information.
Secondly, we design a multi-task decoder with a rich set of supervisory signals, including the original contrastive learning head, a cross-modal classification head, a cross-modal masked language modeling head, and a visual classification head. This multi-task decoder adeptly satisfies the need for strong supervised performance within a multimodal framework.
Experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating exceptional performance in supervised learning while maintaining strong generalization in zero-shot scenarios.

A Multimodal, Multi-Task Adapting Framework for Video Action Recognition

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive proficiency in information retrieval, while they are prone to generating incorrect responses that conflict with reality, a phenomenon known as intrinsic hallucination. The critical challenge lies in the unclear and unreliable fact distribution within LLMs trained on vast amounts of data. The prevalent approach frames the factual detection task as a question-answering paradigm, where the LLMs are asked about factual knowledge and examined for correctness. However, existing studies primarily focused on deriving test cases only from several specific domains, such as movies and sports, limiting the comprehensive observation of missing knowledge and the analysis of unexpected hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose OntoFact, an adaptive framework for detecting unknown facts of LLMs, devoted to mining the ontology-level skeleton of the missing knowledge. Specifically, we argue that LLMs could expose the ontology-based similarity among missing facts and introduce five representative knowledge graphs (KGs) as benchmarks. We further devise a sophisticated ontology-driven reinforcement learning (ORL) mechanism to produce error-prone test cases with specific entities and relations automatically. The ORL mechanism rewards the KGs for navigating toward a feasible direction for unveiling factual errors. Moreover, empirical efforts demonstrate that dominant LLMs are biased towards answering Yes rather than No, regardless of whether this knowledge is included. To mitigate the overconfidence of LLMs, we leverage a hallucination-free detection (HFD) strategy to tackle unfair comparisons between baselines, thereby boosting the result robustness. Experimental results on 5 datasets, using 32 representative LLMs, reveal a general lack of fact in current LLMs. Notably, ChatGPT exhibits fact error rates of 51.6% on DBpedia and 64.7% on YAGO, respectively. Additionally, the ORL mechanism demonstrates promising error prediction scores, with F1 scores ranging from 70% to 90% across most LLMs. Compared to the exhaustive testing, ORL achieves an average recall of 80% while reducing evaluation time by 35.29% to 63.12%.

OntoFact: Unveiling Fantastic Fact-Skeleton of LLMs via Ontology-Driven Reinforcement Learning

Recent studies show that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents tend to overfit to the task on which they were trained and fail to adapt to minor environment changes. To expedite learning when transferring to unseen tasks, we propose a novel approach to representing the current task using reward machines (RMs), state machine abstractions that induce subtasks based on the current task’s rewards and dynamics. Our method provides agents with symbolic representations of optimal transitions from their current abstract state and rewards them for achieving these transitions. These representations are shared across tasks, allowing agents to exploit knowledge of previously encountered symbols and transitions, thus enhancing transfer. Empirical results show that our representations improve sample efficiency and few-shot transfer in a variety of domains.

Contextual Pre-planning on Reward Machine Abstractions for Enhanced Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning | VIDEO

Sound Event Detection (SED) aims to predict the temporal boundaries of all the events of interest and their class labels, given an unconstrained audio sample. Taking either the split-and-classify (i.e., frame-level) strategy or the more principled event-level modeling approach, all existing methods consider the SED problem from the discriminative learning perspective. In this work, we reformulate the SED problem by taking a generative learning perspective. Specifically, we aim to generate sound temporal boundaries from noisy proposals in a denoising diffusion process, conditioned on a target audio sample. During training, our model learns to reverse the noising process by converting noisy latent queries to the ground-truth versions in the elegant Transformer decoder framework. Doing so enables the model generate accurate event boundaries from even noisy queries during inference. Extensive experiments on the Urban-SED and EPIC-Sounds datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing alternatives, with 40+% faster convergence in training. Code: https://github.com/Surrey-UPLab/DiffSED

DiffSED: Sound Event Detection with Denoising Diffusion

Instruction tuned Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced in generalizing across a diverse set of multi-modal tasks, especially for Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, generating detailed responses that are visually grounded is still a challenging task for these models. We find that even the current state-of-the-art LVLMs (InstructBLIP) still contain a staggering 30 percent of the hallucinatory text in the form of non-existent objects, unfaithful descriptions, and inaccurate relationships. To address this, we introduce M-HalDetect, a (M)ultimodal (Hal)lucination (Detect)ion Dataset that can be used to train and benchmark models for hallucination detection and prevention. M-HalDetect consists of 16k fine-grained annotations on VQA examples, making it the first comprehensive multi-modal hallucination detection dataset for detailed image descriptions. Unlike previous work that only consider object hallucination, we additionally annotate both entity descriptions and relationships that are unfaithful. To demonstrate the potential of this dataset for hallucination prevention, we optimize InstructBLIP through our novel Fine-grained Direct Preference Optimization (FDPO). We also train fine-grained multi-modal reward models from InstructBLIP and evaluate their effectiveness with best-of-n rejection sampling (RS). We perform human evaluation on both FDPO and rejection sampling, and find that they reduce hallucination rates in InstructBLIP by 41% and 55% respectively. We also find that our reward model generalizes to other multi-modal models, reducing hallucinations in LLaVA and mPLUG-OWL by 15% and 57% respectively, and has strong correlation with human evaluated accuracy scores.

Detecting and Preventing Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models

Traditional knowledge graph embedding (KGE) methods typically require preserving the entire knowledge graph (KG) with significant training costs when new knowledge emerges. To address this issue, the continual knowledge graph embedding (CKGE) task has been proposed to train the KGE model by learning emerging knowledge efficiently while simultaneously preserving decent old knowledge. However, the explicit graph structure in KGs, which is critical for the above goal, has been heavily ignored by existing CKGE methods. On the one hand, existing methods usually learn new triples in a random order, destroying the inner structure of new KGs. On the other hand, old triples are preserved with equal priority, failing to alleviate catastrophic forgetting effectively. In this paper, we propose a competitive method for CKGE based on incremental distillation (IncDE), which considers the full use of the explicit graph structure in KGs. First, to optimize the learning order, we introduce a hierarchical strategy, ranking new triples for layer-by-layer learning. By employing the inter- and intra-hierarchical orders together, new triples are grouped into layers based on the graph structure features. Secondly, to preserve the old knowledge effectively, we devise a novel incremental distillation mechanism, which facilitates the seamless transfer of entity representations from the previous layer to the next one, promoting old knowledge preservation. Finally, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm to avoid the over-corruption of old knowledge influenced by under-trained new knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of IncDE over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, the incremental distillation mechanism contributes to improvements of 0.2\%-6.5\% in the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) score. More exploratory experiments validate the effectiveness of IncDE in proficiently learning new knowledge while preserving old knowledge across all time steps.

Towards Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding via Incremental Distillation

Understanding student behavior in educational settings is critical in improving both the quality of pedagogy and the level of student engagement. While various AI-based models exist for classroom analysis, they tend to specialize in limited tasks and lack generalizability across diverse educational environments. Additionally, these models often fall short in ensuring student privacy and in providing actionable insights accessible to educators. To bridge this gap, we introduce a unified, end-to-end framework by leveraging temporal action detection techniques and advanced large language models for a more nuanced student behavior analysis. Our proposed framework provides an end-to-end pipeline that starts with raw classroom video footage and culminates in the autonomous generation of pedagogical reports. It offers a comprehensive and scalable solution for student behavior analysis. Experimental validation confirms the capability of our framework to accurately identify student behaviors and to produce pedagogically meaningful insights, thereby setting the stage for future AI-assisted educational assessments.

From Raw Video to Pedagogical Insights: A Unified Framework for Student Behavior Analysis

Motor skills, especially fine motor skills like handwriting, play an essential role in academic pursuits and everyday life. Traditional methods to teach these skills, although effective, can be time-consuming and inconsistent. With the rise of advanced technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, there is increasing interest in automating such teaching processes. In this study, we examine the potential of a virtual AI teacher in emulating the techniques of human educators for motor skill acquisition. We introduce an AI teacher model that captures the distinct characteristics of human instructors. Using a reinforcement learning environment tailored to mimic teacher-learner interactions, we tested our AI model against four guiding hypotheses, emphasizing improved learner performance, enhanced rate of skill acquisition, and reduced variability in learning outcomes. Our findings, validated on synthetic learners, revealed significant improvements across all tested hypotheses. Notably, our model showcased robustness across different learners and settings and demonstrated adaptability to handwriting. This research underscores the potential of integrating Imitation and Reinforcement Learning models with robotics in revolutionizing the teaching of critical motor skills.

Mimicking the Maestro: Exploring the Efficacy of a Virtual AI Teacher in Fine Motor Skill Acquisition

This is the New Faculty Highlights application for Xinya Du.
It includes the cover letter, CV, and statement for the research talk.

Making Natural Language Reasoning Explainable and Faithful

The attached file contains my CV, research statement, and cover letter for application.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2024

A Multimodal, Multi-Task Adapting Framework for Video Action Recognition

Similar lecture

‘What Do Children Think About AI?’: Insights and Educational Implications from Primary School Students’ Perceptions of AI