Henry Kautz
Talk presented Henry Kautz, winner of the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award, at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2020) in New York, NY on February 10, 2020. Dr. Kautz received the award for for “outstanding research contributions in the area of knowledge representation, data analytics, and data mining of social media for public good.”
Abstract: The first AI summer was based on optimism about the power of general power solving, and the second on the power of knowledge engineering. Advances in machine learning have brought us into the third AI summer. This time, however, the stakes are incalculably higher than in the past. The danger is not just, as before, that marketplace hype and an overly narrow scientific focus will lead to disillusionment and retrenchment; but rather that AI now works well enough that it can be used – and is already being used – to eliminate human freedom and dignity. A dystopian future is not inevitable; progress in AI might instead usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity, knowledge, and freedom. This talk will explore the scientific, social, and geopolitical forces at play in the third AI summer.
Henry Kautz is currently serving as director for the division for Information & Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. He a professor of computer science and founding director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester. He has been a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and a full professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2010, he was elected President of AAAI, and in 2016 was elected Chair of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication. His interdisciplinary research includes practical algorithms for solving worst-case intractable problems in logical and probabilistic reasoning; models for inferring human behavior from sensor data; pervasive healthcare applications of AI; and social media analytics. In 1989 he received the IJCAI Computers & Thought Award, which recognizes outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence, and 30 years later received 2018 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for career contributions that have breadth within computer science and that bridge computer science and other disciplines.
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