Connectionists: The Future of AI is Human, online event Dec 15 featuring Jay McClelland and others

[Putten, P.W.H. van der]

** The Future of AI is Human **

The SAILS AI research initiative at Leiden University, the Netherlands, is inviting you to come and join us for an online event on the intersection of AI & art, science and society, on Tuesday December 15, 16.30-18.30 CET. It will conclude with an interview with Jay McClelland, co-author of the classical 1986 PDP Books on connectionist models of the mind.

Free registration at https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/sails/research/webinar-dec-2020-art-society-and-technology

We are not alone anymore. Artificial Intelligence is changing society, for better or for worse, and we will need to find new ways to relate to our artificial counterparts. Will our joint future be symbiotic, antagonistic or more one of fruitful collaboration? And what can we actually learn from the AI about what makes us human – perhaps even beyond intelligence? What are the grand challenges that are still out there, and do we even know how to begin to tackle them? 

SAILS, the Leiden University wide research program on AI, has the pleasure to invite you to a livestream talk show on December 15, where we invite artists, scientists and designers to debate and imagine our future with AI, through a whirlwind of very current yet not so middle-of-the-road artworks and research projects. 

Jay McClelland from Stanford University, whose books on neural networks launched the previous AI summer in the eighties, will conclude the event with his thoughts on the big pieces of puzzle still missing and reflect on our long-term future with AI. 

Our guests: 
•    Designer Vera van der Seyp will explain how she used AI to create the graphical design and typography for this event, and how she collaborates with AI in her creative practice.
•    Artists and researchers Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders will discuss their creative robotic works that explore our entanglements with machines, and vice versa.
•    Sex care robots for elderly: why not? Eduard Fosch Villaronga on making robotics and AI in general more inclusive, for groups such as elderly people, people with disabilities and the LGBTQ+ communities.
•    It seems hard to escape our filter bubbles nowadays and misinformation is rampant. Is the use of AI in the hunt for clicks to blame? Or can we reverse the role of AI in online media? Designer Jasper Schelling and researcher Suzan Verberne will share their views on how to uncover framing, junk news and polarization, separate news from opinion and provide diversity in recommendations.
•    Since its inception in the 1950s, the field of AI has been characterized by ebbs and flows. Jay McClelland is a cognitive psychologist who was right there at the spring of a new AI summer. In fact, one could argue he helped kickstart it. We will hear his views on what inspired his early work in parallel distributed processing and connectionist models of the mind, his thoughts on the incredible success of deep neural networks, and what the future of AI could hold.

More detailed information on the speakers and the event is available on the SAILS website at https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/sails/research/webinar-dec-2020-art-society-and-technology

Kind regards,

Peter

Peter van der Putten
Assistant professor, LIACS, Leiden University, The Netherlands
http://liacs.leidenuniv.nl/~puttenpwhvander/