Join us for the next instalment of the National Edge AI Hub’s webinar series, “Service-Oriented Evolution of Modern AI,” by Dr. Zheng Li of Queen’s University Belfast. His talk will explore the architectural evolution of modern AI across three major waves: predictive, generative, and agentic. Drawing on analogical reasoning and lessons from software engineering, he reveals how AI is shifting from monolithic systems toward service-oriented, collaborative paradigms.
Attendees will gain insights into:
- The limitations of current AI approaches and emerging trends
- How service-oriented principles can guide future AI development
- Opportunities such as agent-friendly APIs and serverless AI agents
- Why reusing software architecture knowledge can accelerate AI innovation
When: December 3rd, 2 PM GMT
Where: Zoom, link will be provided to all who register.
Abstract: It is well known that understanding the evolution of technologies and its cause is essential for more discoveries and innovations. In the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain, it has also been identified that scrutinising the development context and path of AI will be able to help both academia and industry better understand the current AI limitations, reveal future AI trends, and facilitate AI/digital transformations. Given the dramatic boom of modern AI, this webinar tends to potentially unearth the evolution pattern along the recent three AI waves (namely predictive AI, generative AI and agentic AI), and accordingly to guide AI research and development to focus on the most promising directions. We employed analogical reasoning as the research method and referred to the existing software architectural styles to inspire our understanding of the architectural evolution of modern AI technologies. We see a service-oriented trend in modern AI’s working mechanisms, and the offering of AI power seems to be transiting from a heavyweight and monolithic paradigm to an organisational and collaborative paradigm with more and more specific separation of concerns. Following this service-oriented evolution trend, we borrow software architecture lessons and foresee opportunities to grow the current AI wave to a further height, e.g., standardising AI agent-friendly APIs and developing serverless AI agents. Ultimately, we draw tentative conclusions: What is happening in the AI domain has happened before in the software engineering domain. It is worth reusing software architecture knowledge to evolve the architecture of AI technologies.
About the Speaker: Zheng Li received his Ph.D. degree and M.Phil degree from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) respectively. During the same time, he was a graduate researcher with the Software Systems Research Group (SSRG) at National ICT Australia (NICTA). He is now a lecturer at the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Previously, he was a tenured assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Concepción, Chile. Before that, he was a postdoc researcher with the Cloud Control group at Lund University, Sweden. He was also a visiting research fellow with Software Institute at Nanjing University, China. Before studying abroad, he had around four-year industrial experience in China after receiving his M.Sc.Eng. degree from Beijing University of Chemical Technology and the B.Eng. degree from Zhengzhou University. His research interests include big data analytics, edge/cloud computing, empirical software engineering, and performance engineering.