Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to remake our world. The media report the threats and opportunities of this technology every day. But most journalists and laypeople have no intuition about how AI works and so can’t distinguish hype from reality or understand its true potential. In fact, almost all modern AI systems are based on a relatively simple technology known as “Deep Learning”. This talk provides a high-level description of how deep learning works and how it enables chatbots, image generation, game playing, automatic translation, and other applications. The talk is pitched to be easily understandable to a general audience and will provide insights into the limitations of AI. Is it dangerous? Can it be creative? Will AI ever be smarter than human beings?

Bio

Simon Prince is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bath. He holds a D.Phil. in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford. He has authored more than fifty academic papers and is the author of “Computer Vision: Models, Learning and Inference” (CUP, 2012) and “Understanding Deep Learning” (MIT Press, 2023). Beyond academia, he has worked applying machine learning in the computer graphics, security, and banking sectors.