Artificial intelligence expert to speak at Doha meet

A globally acclaimed expert on artificial intelligence (AI), Prof Patrick Winston from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, will visit Qatar later this month.The professor of AI and computer science is to give a public talk on “The Future of AI: Where we are, how we got there and where we are going”, on March 27 at the Qatar National Convention Centre.It is the highlight of an annual meeting in Qatar between MIT CSAIL and Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI).Prof Winston’s research group at CSAIL studies how humans’ story-understanding faculty separates us from other species. A story-understanding system developed by his group reads simple stories, answers questions about them, asks intelligent questions, identifies concepts, retells persuasively, educates, summaries, compares and authors.His research integrates work from several allied fields, including AI, computer science, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics and palaeoanthropology. Prof Winston’s early work was supervised by the late Marvin Minsky, a computing pioneer regarded as the “father of artificial intelligence”.Dr Ahmed Elmagarmid, executive director of QCRI, described Prof Winston as “one of the finest experts in Artificial Intelligence,” and urged Qatar residents to hear him speak.“This is a critical time in the development of AI, which has seen a resurgence as advanced AI techniques like deep neural networks, big data and powerful computing hardware are poised to transform society in a way not seen since the industrial revolution,” Dr Elmagarmid said.“Prof Winston has been witness to the evolution of AI, having led MIT’s AI Lab from 1992 to 1997 and is an author of several books on AI, computer vision, and computer programming.”