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Abstract:
During the past decade, there has been remarkable progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI). More recently, the emergence of Generative AI was an inflection point in cognitive pattern understanding and generation across multiple modalities including speech, text, imagery, and vision, where AI systems are increasingly matching or surpassing human performance on a growing array of cognitive tasks. These models have been seamlessly integrated into numerous applications and products, reaching hundreds of millions of users. As a result, discussions regarding the achievement of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) have shifted from theoretical speculation to a plausible near to mid-term objective. In this talk, we present a comprehensive review of the evolution of AI from its inception to the present day. We then examine how advances in computational infrastructure, algorithms, and large-scale modeling are converging to drive the generative AI revolution and shaping the trajectory toward AGI, potentially within the next 5-to-10 years. Specifically, we analyze recent progress in compute capabilities, learning algorithms, and model architectures across a broad spectrum of cognitive tasks. We also share our perspective on the key challenges that remain to be solved, and discuss the critical risks that must be addressed to ensure the safe and beneficial development of AI systems that may eventually exceed human-level performance in perception, reasoning, and general cognition.
Bio:
Ruhi Sarikaya is Vice President of Alexa AI at Amazon. With his team, he has been building LLM based core AI capabilities, model training and fine-tuning, natural language understanding, dialog management, contextual understanding, proactive recommendations, personalization, self-learning, metrics and analytics for Alexa. Prior to joining Amazon, he was a principal science manager and the founder of the language understanding and dialog systems group at Microsoft between 2011 and 2016. His group has built the language understanding and dialog management capabilities of Cortana, Xbox One, and the underlying platform. Before Microsoft, he was a research staff member and team lead in the Human Language Technologies Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for ten years. Prior to IBM, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at University of Colorado at Boulder for two years. He received his BS degree from Bilkent University, MS degree from Clemson University, and Ph.D. degree from Duke University, all in electrical and computer engineering. He has published 135 technical papers in refereed journal and conference proceedings and is the inventor of over 90 issued/pending patents. Dr. Sarikaya has served in the IEEE SLTC, the general co-chair of IEEE SLT’12, publicity chair of IEEE ASRU’05, and associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing and IEEE Signal Processing Letters. He was named IEEE SPS Distinguished Industry Speaker and is an IEEE Fellow. He is serving on the advisory board of several universities and engineering departments.
Part of the Siebel School Speakers Series. Faculty Host: Heng Ji
Meeting ID: 826 7471 2332
Passcode: csillinois
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