Date: Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Danbury Hospital Auditorium
Presenter: Andrew Ribeiro
By Richard Corzo
We’re finding more and more examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world around us. We have intelligent assistants like Alexa, Siri, and OK Google. There are now self-driving cars. We have programs that beat champions in chess and the Chinese board game Go. Expert systems like Watson can beat Jeopardy champions, or assist doctors in diagnosing patients. Our guide to this subject will be Andrew Ribeiro, who leads an AI Meetup group at the Danbury Hackerspace, and is co-founder of Knowledge-Exploration Systems.
Andrew will concentrate on the new area of deep learning, itself a subset of machine learning (ML), which “gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.” Deep learning requires access to massive amounts of data that enables it to recognize patterns. His talk will paint a picture of the historical trends in Artificial Intelligence that led to the emergence of deep learning and will discuss the state of the art models which are transforming the field.
Prior to deep learning, people used a huge variety of methods to solve particular AI problems. With the popularization of deep learning, people have been using deep neural networks for everything with record breaking success. Analogous to neural networks in the brain, artificial neural networks consist “of a number of simple, highly interconnected processing elements.” From beating Go champions to self-driving cars, people in the field use neural networks in some capacity now.
Andrew’s talk will be similar to a presentation given at Google by Pedro Domingos, author of The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World.
If you are interested in getting into the field, Andrew can point you to the mathematics that you will need to learn, and online courses that will give you a good background.
Andrew Ribeiro is a computer scientist working in the field of Artificial Intelligence as the co-founder of Knowledge-Exploration Systems–a Danbury based AI and systems development contractor. He studied traditional computer science at WCSU and extended his knowledge to include AI by taking online courses, reading the classic books, and reading research papers in the field while applying the ideas to commercial R&D applications. Due to the intensive intellectual demands of mastering such a diverse field, he also co-founded Danbury AI in 2016 to foster a local community of AI experts and enthusiasts that help each other grow and learn.