Abstract
The game of the century between Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo and the World GO Champion Lee Sedol has captured major headlines. This million dollar game is between an Artificial Intelligence powered computer software named AlphaGo and one of the world’s most famous GO Champions Lee Sedol. What is Artificial Intelligence? How does AlphaGo compare with the achievements of IBM's Deep Blue and Watson in importance? What is behind AlphaGo's algorithm? What does this game’s outcome mean to the future of human kind? In this talk, the speaker will explain in layman’s terms for us to gain a better understanding of the technology and beyond.
About the speaker
Prof Qiang Yang obtained his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1989. Before he joined HKUST, he had been an assistant/associate professor at the University of Waterloo between 1989 and 1995, and a professor and NSERC Industrial Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in Canada from 1995 to 2001. From 2012 to 2014, he took professional leave to join Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab as its head, leading the first large-scale industrial research lab in Hong Kong in addressing the Big Data challenge and exploring new opportunities in the telecommunications and IT industry. He has been appointed as Head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering and New Bright Professor of Engineering since January 2015.
Prof Yang’s research interests are in Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence: in particular Transfer Learning, Lifelong Machine Learning and Planning. Being a world-renowned expert who has gained global research recognition in the field, Prof Yang has established very strong connections internationally and locally, both in the academia and industry. He is the director of the HKUST Big Data Institute, director of the WeChat-HKUST Artificial Intelligence Technology Lab (WHAT Lab), and Program Chair of the 2015 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Prof Yang is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has been a keynote speaker in many top conferences in AI and data mining, and has been a champion in the KDDCUP data-mining competitions of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology and is now the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Big Data. He is also the only Asian member of the Board of Trustees of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the top international society for Artificial Intelligence research and practice.
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