Public Lecture (all welcome) UNDERSTANDING AI

Speaker:  Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown | Professor Computer Science | University of British Columbia

Date: April, 10
Time: 11 am
Room: 2-104 (Dr. Alvin Woods Building) & Hybrid

Summary: Artificial intelligence is already moving from science fiction to reality, and Canadian scientists are leading the way—indeed, Canada was the first country in the world to develop a "national AI strategy". This broadly accessible talk will describe the scientific journey that has brought us to this point, explain some of the core ideas that make modern AI technologies work, and offer some educated speculation about how AI will impact our lives in the years to come.

Biography: Kevin Leyton-Brown, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor Computer Science and at the University of British Columbia, holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, is an associate member of the Vancouver School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC; awarded in 2023), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM; awarded in 2020), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI; awarded in 2018). He was a member of a team that won the 2018 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science, described as "the leading O.R. and analytics award in the industry." He holds a PhD and M.Sc. from Stanford University (2003; 2001) and a B.Sc. from McMaster University (1998). He studies artificial intelligence and machine learning with a focus on connections both to microeconomic theory and to the design of algorithms for hard combinatorial problems. He is the Director of UBC's Center for AI Decision-making and Action and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Berkley, Stanford, and Microsoft Research New York, and in several countries including Israel. He has received multiple research awards including from Amazon, Facebook and Google.