February 7th - Arlindo Oliveira


Arlindo Oliveira (IST/INESC-ID)

Will Deep Convolutional Neural Networks open the way to Artificial General Intelligence?

Abstract:

Artificial Intelligence, and its diverse subfields, including machine learning, has been the subject of intense study for more than half a century. Recent advances in machine learning, jointly known as deep learning, have partially closed the gap that exists between the abilities of naturally intelligent systems (i.e., brains) and artificially intelligent ones in problems related with perception. Additionally, some problems that have been deemed very hard to solve, like learning to play the game of Go from scratch, have fallen to approaches that combine deep reinforcement learning with efficient computation methods. However, the depth of understanding of these systems is still very limited, and many counterexamples exist that show that DCNNs (deep convolutional neural networks) are still very far from approaching human abilities even in simple perception problems. In this seminar, I will lead an interactive discussion about the power and limitations of DCNNs and whether this technology will lead the way to artificial general intelligence or will simply become one more tool in the practitioners toolbox. Active involvement from the audience will be expected.

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Bio: Arlindo Oliveira was born in Angola and has lived in Mozambique, Portugal, Switzerland and California. He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and his PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was a researcher at CERN and at the Berkeley Cadence Laboratories. He is a professor at the computer science and engineering department of IST and a researcher at INESC-ID. He authored three books, translated in different languages, and more than 150 articles in international conferences and journals. He has been on the boards of a number of companies and institutions and is a past president of INESC-ID and of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the IEEE and of the Portuguese Academy of Engineering. He became president of Instituto Superior Técnico in 2012.