CS Seminar Series – Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard University) – From the Turing Test to Smart Partners: “Is Your System Smart Enough To Work With Us?”

Date: May 19, 2017

Speaker: Prof. Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard University)

Location: DBH 6011

Time: 11am – 12pm

Host: Gary Olson

Title: From the Turing Test to Smart Partners: “Is Your System Smart Enough To Work With Us?”

Abstract: For much of its history, most research in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has centered on issues of building intelligent machines, independently of a consideration of their interactions with people. As the world of computing has evolved, and systems–smart or otherwise–pervade ever more facets of life, tackling the challenges of building computer systems smart enough to work effectively with people, in groups as well as individually, has become of increasing importance. In this talk, I will argue for considering “people-in- the-loop” as central to AI for both pragmatic and cognitive science reasons, present some fundamental scientific questions this teamwork stance raises, and describe research by my group on computational models of collaboration and their use in supporting health-care coordination.

Bio: Barbara Grosz is Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She has made many contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through her pioneering research in natural language processing and in theories of multi-agent collaboration and their application to human-computer interaction. She was founding dean of science and then dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and she is known for her role in the establishment and leadership of interdisciplinary institutions and for her contributions to the advancement of women in science. She currently chairs the Standing Committee for Stanford’s One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence and serves on the boards of several scientific and scholarly institutes. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Philosophical Society, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computing Machinery, and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She received the 2009 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and the 2015 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, AI’s highest honor.

Return to the Spring 2017 CS Seminar Series Schedule