Lecture 1 (Public lecture): Tuesday, 04 July 2023, 16:30 to 17:30
Lecture 2: Wednesday, 05 July 2023, 09:30 to 10:30
Lecture 3: Thursday, 06 July, 09:30 to 10:30
Title: An Alternative View on AI: Collaborative Learning, Incentives, Social Welfare, and Dynamics
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on a paradigm in which intelligence inheres in a single, autonomous agent. Social issues are entirely secondary in this paradigm. When AI systems are deployed in social contexts, however, the overall design of such systems is often naive---a centralized entity provides services to passive agents and reaps the rewards. Such a paradigm need not be the dominant paradigm for information technology. In a broader framing, agents are active, they are cooperative, and they wish to obtain value from their participation in learning-based systems. Agents may supply data and other resources to the system, only if it is in their interest to do so. Critically, intelligence inheres as much in the overall system as it does in individual agents, be they humans or computers. This is a perspective familiar in the social sciences, and a first goal in this line of work is to bring economics into contact with the computing and data sciences. The long-term goal is two-fold---to provide a broader conceptual foundation for emerging real-world AI systems, and to upend received wisdom in the computational, economic, and inferential disciplines.
About the speaker:
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was the inaugural winner of the World Laureates Association (WLA) Prize in 2022. He was a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He has received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the David E. Rumelhart Prize, and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award. In 2016, Prof. Jordan was named the "most influential computer scientist" worldwide in an article in Science, based on rankings from the Semantic Scholar search engine.
This lecture is part of the discussion meeting "Data Science: Probabilistic and Optimization Methods".