Where on Earth is AI Headed?

Ten years ago, computers could not understand spoken words well, but today we routinely speak to our mobile phones, and computer vision algorithms have now reached human or super-human level performance for many types of images. Self-driving cars are already appearing on our streets, and a deep network called GPT-3 writes surprisingly human-like paragraphs of text. What is coming next? This talk will look forward to suggest what technical progress we might work toward and even expect over the coming years, and its possible impacts on our lifestyles, products, business models, society and international politics.

Speaker Bios

Tom M. Mitchell is the Founders University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he founded the world’s first academic Machine Learning Department. Mitchell’s research explores machine learning theory, algorithms and applications, as well as the impact of AI on society. He has testified to the U.S. Congress several times on AI impacts on society, and he co-chaired the 2017 U.S. National Academy study on “Information Technology, Automation, and the U.S. Workforce.” Mitchell advises a variety of young and old companies internationally on their AI product and business strategies, and his research has been featured in popular press from the New York Times, to CCTV (China’s national television network), to CBS’s 60 Minutes. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow and Past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).