Artificial Intelligence: Recent Advances and Future Trends

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"The Beauty of Artificial Intelligence Seminar Series"

Date:           Monday, 25 April 2016
Time:           10:00am - 12 noon
Venue:          Lecture Theater G (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

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(Seminar I)
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Speaker:        Dr. Tie-Yan LIU
                Principal Researcher
                Microsoft Research Asia

Title:          "Artificial Intelligence: Recent Advances and Future
                 Trends"

Time:           10:00am to 10:30am

Abstract:

This talk starts with a brief review of recent advances in artificial
intelligence, including the success of deep learning in speech
recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing, and the
success of deep reinforcement learning in playing Atari games and winning
Sedol Lee, the world champion of Go. One natural question behind these
exciting moments is what is the true technical driving force that makes
them happen. Regarding this question, I would like to point out that
neither deep learning nor reinforcement learning is new;  what makes them
different today is the availability of big training data and the big
computational power that allows us to leverage these data to train big and
deep models. With this in mind, another question is whether this "big"
refinement of AI can really make it more intelligent than human. My own
answer is not very positive, given that we are still unclear about the
underlying mechanisms behind human's magic behaviors of learning from very
small samples, learning from unsupervised or weakly supervised data,
dealing with non-computable tasks, and having emotion, consciousness,
creativity, and sociality. Therefore, the best strategy for us to develop
and leverage AI is to let it do what it is good at, and make it our
extended capabilities: just like the armor of Iron Man, which makes him a
super hero but does not bother him by its potential threats.

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Biography:

Tie-Yan Liu is a principal researcher of Microsoft Research Asia, leading
the machine learning group. His research interests include learning to
rank for information retrieval, distributed machine learning, and
algorithmic game theory. As a researcher in an industrial lab, Tie-Yan is
making his unique contributions to the world. On one hand, many of his
technologies have been transferred to Microsoft's products and online
services, such as Bing, Microsoft Advertising, and Azure. He has received
many recognitions and awards in Microsoft for his significant product
impacts. On the other hand, he has been actively contributing to academic
communities. He is an adjunct professor at CMU (LTI) and several other
universities. His top ten papers have been cited over 4000 times in
refereed conferences and journals. He has won quite a few awards,
including the best student paper award at SIGIR (2008), the most cited
paper award at Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representation
(2004-2006), and the research break-through award at Microsoft Research
(2012). He has been invited to serve as general chair, PC chair, or area
chair for a dozen of top conferences including SIGIR, WWW, KDD, NIPS,
IJCAI, AAAI, ICTIR, as well as associate editor/editorial board member of
ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Web,
Information Retrieval Journal, and Foundations and Trends in Information
Retrieval. Tie-Yan Liu and his works have been reported by many
International media, including National Public Radio, CNET, MIT Technology
Review, and PCTech Magazine.