Date: Thursday, May. 1
Time: 10:00am - 11:00am
Location: NWC 14th FLR conference room
Seminar: Pursuing the Nature of Intelligence
Host: John Wright
Speaker: Yi Ma, School of CDS, Hong Kong University; EECSDepartment, UC Berkeley
Abstract:
In this talk, we will try to clarify differentlevels and mechanisms of intelligence from historical, scientific, mathematical,and computational perspective. From the evolution of intelligence in nature,from phylogenetic, to ontogenetic, to societal, and to artificial intelligence,we will try to shed light on how to understand the true nature of the seeminglydramatic advancements in the technologies of machine intelligence in the pastdecade. We achieve this goal by developing a principled mathematical frameworkto explain the practice of deep learning from the perspective of compressivedata encoding and decoding. This framework not only reveals true nature hence limitationsof the current practice and but also provides principled guidelines to develop morecomplete and more efficient learning architectures and systems. Eventually, wewill clarify the difference and relationship between Knowledge and Intelligence,which may guide us to pursue the goal of developing systems with trueintelligence.
Bio of the Speaker:
Yi Ma is a Chair Professor inArtificial Intelligence, the inaugural director of the School of Computing andData Science and the Institute of Data Science of the University of Hong Kong since2023. His research interests include computer vision, high-dimensionaldata analysis, and integrated intelligent systems. Yi received his two bachelor’sdegrees in Automation and Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University in 1995,two master’s degrees in EECS and Mathematics in 1997, and a PhD degree in EECSfrom UC Berkeley in 2000. He served on the faculty of UIUC ECE from 2000to 2011, the principal researcher and manager of the Visual Computing group ofMicrosoft Research Asia from 2009 to 2014, and the Executive Dean of the Schoolof Information Science and Technology of ShanghaiTech University from 2014 to2017. He was on the faculty of UC Berkeley EECS Department from 2018-2023,where he continues to be a visiting professor. He has published over 65 journalpapers, 150 conference papers, and three textbooks on 3D vision, generalized PCA,and high-dimensional data analysis. He received the NSF Career award in 2004and the ONR Young Investigator award in 2005. He also received the David Marrprize in computer vision from ICCV 1999 and best paper awards from ECCV 2004and ACCV 2009. He has served as the Program Chair for ICCV 2013 and the GeneralChair for ICCV 2015. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and SIAM.