Moving Beyond the AI Black Box: The Latest in AI (Keynote)

Tolga Kortoglu, CEO of PARC discusses the importance of developing new science to advance the field of AI. He will discuss the latest in XAI research and share how AI is being applied across a number of industries today. Humans accomplish pretty amazing things, as do machines — each contributing vastly different talents and skills. We’ve all been working with machines for decades, and yet we are only starting to increase our efficiency, and intelligence, in order to solve incredibly significant problems. Machines already master natural language, count and analyze massive numbers, answer complex questions, operate vehicles, and more.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning give machines the ability to read and study in order to learn. It develops algorithms to build on its own learning. Many decisions can be made inside that ‘black box’ of learnings, inside the computer.  However, software is getting more intellectual, and less transparent, hence, the black box concern.  The field of AI brings exciting promise, offering humans and machines the ability to learn from each other and work together in ways that we haven’t yet experienced. Even more new science is needed in reshaping the human-computer collaboration, and, today, researchers are working hard to make AI more understandable, and more trustable.

One of the things we hope to achieve this exciting and innovative work is to establish common ground, a common language, giving humans a way to understand why machines ‘think’ the way they do. This is incredibly important as we start to rely on machines in automotive, healthcare, banking, manufacturing, and other industries.