Events Calendar

CS Distinguished Lecture: Rodney Allen Brooks (MIT, iRobot, Rethink) - Steps Towards Super Intelligence

Speaker: Rodney Allen Brooks, MIT, iRobot, Rethink

Talk Title: Steps Towards Super Intelligence

Series: CS Distinguished Lectures

Abstract: In his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Alan Turing estimated that sixty people working for fifty years should be able to program a computer (running at 1950 speed) to have human level intelligence. AI researchers have spent orders of magnitude more effort than that and are still not close. Why has AI been so hard and what are the problems that we might work on in order to make real progress to human level intelligence, or even the super intelligence that many pundits believe is just around the corner? This talk will discuss those steps we can take, what aspects we really still do not have much of a clue about, what we might be currently getting completely wrong, and why it all could be centuries away. Importantly the talk will make distinctions between research questions and barriers to technology adoption from research results, with a little speculation on things that might go wrong (spoiler alert: it is the mundane that will have the big consequences, not the Hollywood scenarios that the press and some academics love to talk about).

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.

Biography: Rodney Brooks earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in pure mathematics from Flinders University in South Australia. In 1977 he joined the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford graduating with a PhD in computer science in 1981. After post-docs at Carnegie Mellow and MIT, and a faculty position back at Stanford he joined the MIT faculty at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there in 1984. He worked in computer vision, robotics, and artificial life. He became director of the AI Lab in 1997 and in 2003 he founded the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, CSAIL, which is the largest lab at MIT with over 1,000 members. Along the way he started a software company in silicon valley, a boutique robotics venture capital fund, the company iRobot which has delivered tens of millions of home cleaning robots and many thousand ground robots to the US military, and more recently spent 10 years developing collaborative robots for manufacturing at Rethink Robotics. He retired from MIT In 2010, and currently advises companies large and small, including Toyota and their autonomous driving efforts. He is a member of the NAE and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and AAAI. He writes at rodneybrooks.com/blog.

Host: Maja Mataric

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair