Guest Lecture: Ricardo Baeza-Yates

July 14, 2025

11:00 a.m. CAT

Virtual

Abstract: In the first part, to set the stage, we cover irresponsible AI: (1) discrimination (e.g., facial recognition, justice); (2) pseudoscience (e.g., biometric based predictions); (3) limitations (e.g., human incompetence, minimal adversarial AI), (4) indiscriminate use of computing resources (e.g., large language models) and (5) the impact of generative AI (disinformation, mental health and copyright issues). These examples do have a personal bias but set the context for the second part where we address three challenges: (1) principles & governance, (2) regulation and (3) our cognitive biases. We finish discussing responsible AI initiatives and the near future.

Bio: Ricardo Baeza-Yates is the Founding Director of the AI Institute at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Before, he was Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI  at Northeastern University (2021-25), CTO of NTENT (2016-20) and VP of Research at Yahoo Labs (2006-16), first based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. In 2009 he was elevated to ACM Fellow and in 2011 to IEEE Fellow. He has won national scientific awards in Chile and Spain, among other accolades and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his areas of expertise are responsible AI, bias in algorithmic systems, web search and data mining plus data science and algorithms in general.

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