BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Honorary Lecture – Prof. Boi Faltings
DTSTART:20250516T170000
DTEND:20250516T181000
DTSTAMP:20260531T075537Z
UID:8ca75440302541100e7beaba414a738cbf138499118217555b9922ba
CATEGORIES:Inaugural lectures - Honorary Lecture
DESCRIPTION:Professor Boi Faltings\nDate: Friday 16 May 2025\n\nProgram: 
 \n\n	17:00-17:05: Introduction by Prof. Rüdiger Urbanke\, Dean of the IC 
 School\n	17:05-17:50: Honorary Lecture by Prof. Boi Faltings - "A Brief H
 istory of AI (and what it might mean for the future)"\n	17.50-18:00: Q & A
 \n	18:00-18:10: Presentation of Honorary Diploma by Prof. Edouard Bugnion\
 , Vice President for Innovation and Impact\n	18:10: Thank you and closing 
 - Prof. Rüdiger Urbanke\n	18:10-19:45: Apéritif\n\nLocation:  CO2\n\nR
 egistration: Click here\n\n***********************************************
 ************\n\nProfessor Boi Faltings\n\nA Brief History of AI (and what 
 it might mean for the future)\n\nAbstract\nSince its origins in the 1950s\
 , Artificial Intelligence has repeatedly surprised the public. Early effor
 ts up to 1980 produced game-playing programs\, chatbots\, and autonomous r
 obots —but were limited by computing power. The 1980s brought a shift to
  practical systems like expert systems and automated planning\, but hopes 
 for higher cognitive functions faded due to the high cost of formalizing k
 nowledge.\n\nWith digitalization\, machine learning enabled automated know
 ledge acquisition\, but ambitions remained modest—statistical learning a
 lone couldn’t build the causal understanding needed for higher level int
 elligence.\n\nNow\, large language models offer a powerful new way to buil
 d vast knowledge bases and enable basic reasoning. This revives the origin
 al\ngoal: automating high-level cognitive tasks like planning and design\,
  potentially at superhuman levels.\n\nDrawing on examples from EPFL’s AI
  lab\, I’ll reflect on the field’s evolution and explore how early dre
 ams of AI may finally become reality.\n\nAbout the speaker\nBoi Faltings i
 s a full professor of computer science at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédéra
 le de Lausanne (EPFL)\, where he heads the Artificial Intelligence Laborat
 ory. He has held visiting positions at NEC Research Institute\, Stanford U
 niversity and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has c
 o-founded 6 companies using AI for e-commerce and computer security and ac
 ted as advisor to several others. Prof. Faltings has published over 300 re
 fereed papers and graduated over 40 Ph.D. students\, several of which have
  won national and international awards. He is a fellow of the European Coo
 rdinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence and a fellow of the Associ
 ation for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He holds a Diplom
 a from ETH Zurich and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Ch
 ampaign.
LOCATION:CO2 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==CO%202
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR