AI Lab was well represented at BNAIC 2021, the reference AI and ML conference for Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxemburg which was held from 10 to 12 November 2021.
The best demo award was won by Isel Grau, and the team of the Innoviris project Driving collective data governance through smart engagement platforms which was a collaboration between Collibra, EHB and the AI Lab, as well as Astrid Sierens a master thesis student of the lab. In this demo she showcased our “Talking to your Data” system whose aim is to bring the use of interpretable machine learning techniques close to the business analysts by using natural language. The business analysts can literally talk to their data using a chatbot. The chatbot helps with prediction tasks and gives explanations for these predictions. Check out the paper Talking to your Data: Interactive and interpretable data mining through a conversational agent in the conference’s proceedings.
The paper MoveRL: To A Safer Robotic Reinforcement Learning Environment by Gaoyuan Liu, Joris De Winter, Bram Vanderborght, Ann Nowé, and Denis Steckelmacher won the award for best paper. In this paper, which is a collaboration between AI Lab and our colleagues from Brubotics, the authors explain why Reinforcement Learning is not often used on robots although it has the potential of allowing near-optimal controllers on challenging tasks. As a solution, they introduce MoveRL, a new OpenAI Gym environment which addresses issues such as safety, sample-efficiency and ease of implementation. Check out the paper in the conference’s proceedings.