CBMM Brains, Minds, and Machines Seminar Series: Common Sense Physics and Structured Representation in the Era of Deep Learning
Description
Abstract: The challenge of endowing computers with common sense remains one of the major obstacles to achieving the sort of general artificial intelligence envisioned by the field’s founders. A large part of human common sense pertains to the physics of the everyday world, and rests on a foundational understanding of such concepts as objects, motion, obstruction, containers, portals, support, and so on. In this talk I will discuss the challenge of common sense physics in the context of contemporary progress in deep reinforcement learning, and the question of how deep neural networks can learn representations at the required level of abstraction.
Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92856609553
Event website URL: https://cbmm.mit.edu/news-events/events/cbmm-brains-minds-and-machines-seminar-series-common-sense-physics-and-structured
*Please note the change in start time, this talk will start at 2 PM EST.
Speaker Bio
Murray Shanahan is the Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He graduated from Imperial with a First in computer science in 1984, and obtained his PhD in computer science from Cambridge University (King's College) in 1988. Since then he has carried out work in artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science. He was a postdoc in the Department of Computing at Imperial College from 1987 to 1991, an EPSRC advanced research fellow in the same department from 1991 to 1995, and a senior research fellow in the Computer Science Department at Queen Mary & Westfield College (London) from 1995 to 1998. He went on to be Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, then Reader in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering back at Imperial, rejoining Imperial's Dept. of Computing as Reader in 2005. He was awarded his professorship there in 2006. In 2017 he joined DeepMind, retaining his professorship at Imperial College on a part-time basis. His publications span artificial intelligence, robotics, logic, dynamical systems, computational neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. His work up to 2000 was in the tradition of classical, symbolic AI. He then turned his attention to the brain and its embodiment. His current interests include neurodynamics, consciousness, machine learning, and the impacts of artificial intelligence. His book "Embodiment and the Inner Life" (Oxford University Press, 2010) was a significant influence on the film Ex Machina for which he was a scientific advisor. His book "The Technological Singularity" was published by MIT Press in 2015. He is active in public engagement. He has been on BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, and Radio 5, Channel 4 (television), and on the BBC's 6 o'clock news, 10 o'clock news, and Breakfast Time. He has appeared several times at Cheltenham Science Festival, the World Science Festival (New York), and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, and his work has featured in Focus magazine and (several times) in New Scientist. He is married with two children, and spends a lot of time in North Norfolk.