Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI

We present Queer in AI as a case study for community-led participatory design in AI. We examine how participatory design and intersectional tenets started and shaped this community's programs over the years. We discuss different challenges that emerged in the process, look at ways this organization has fallen short of operationalizing participatory and intersectional principles, and then assess the organization's impact. Queer in AI provides important lessons and insights for practitioners and theorists of participatory methods broadly through its rejection of hierarchy in favor of decentralization, success at building aid and programs by and for the queer community, and effort to change actors and institutions outside of the queer community. Finally, we theorize how communities like Queer in AI contribute to the participatory design in AI more broadly by fostering cultures of participation in AI, welcoming and empowering marginalized participants, critiquing poor or exploitative participatory practices, and bringing participation to institutions outside of individual research projects. Queer in AI's work serves as a case study of grassroots activism and participatory methods within AI, demonstrating the potential of community-led participatory methods and intersectional praxis, while also providing challenges, case studies, and nuanced insights to researchers developing and using participatory methods.Comment: To appear at FAccT 202

Structured Object-Aware Physics Prediction for Video Modeling and Planning

When humans observe a physical system, they can easily locate objects, understand their interactions, and anticipate future behavior, even in settings with complicated and previously unseen interactions. For computers, however, learning such models from videos in an unsupervised fashion is an unsolved research problem. In this paper, we present STOVE, a novel state-space model for videos, which explicitly reasons about objects and their positions, velocities, and interactions. It is constructed by combining an image model and a dynamics model in compositional manner and improves on previous work by reusing the dynamics model for inference, accelerating and regularizing training. STOVE predicts videos with convincing physical behavior over hundreds of timesteps, outperforms previous unsupervised models, and even approaches the performance of supervised baselines. We further demonstrate the strength of our model as a simulator for sample efficient model-based control in a task with heavily interacting objects.Comment: Published as a conference paper at 2020 International Conference for Learning Representation