Imagination Machines: Today we Google, Tomorrow we will Woz is coming at
04/23/2018 - 4:00pm

LINC 200
Mon, 04/23/2018 - 4:00pm

Sridhar Mahadevan
Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science , Stanford University

Abstract:
Humans exhibit a strong predisposition to imagine — to mentally transcend
time, place, and circumstance — from an early age. Cave paintings and
sculptures found in Europe from tens of thousands of years ago show that our
ancestors were capable of depicting or carving impossible objects.
Imagination is found in every mythology in the world, from the Greeks to the
Hindus. Imagination is prized in the arts, literature, music, poetry, as well
as science and engineering.
In this talk, we introduce a new challenge for artificial intelligence: how
to build imagination machines? Much of the recent excitement in AI is based
on advances in data science, which is broadly the study of methods that
convert samples into probability distributions. Data science is the study of
“what-is”: like statistics, it studies the summarization of historical
data.
We introduce a new field of study in AI called imagination science that, in
contrast, is the study of “What if”? and “Why?”. Imagination science
extends data science to answer a much broader range of questions, ranging
from interventions to impossible counterfactual situations. We show that a
number of converging lines of research in AI can be seen as attempts to build
imagination machines, ranging from recent work on generative adversarial
networks to cognitive architectures that combine observation, intervention
and counterfactual reasoning. We summarize novel research ideas, including
new ways of modeling sequential decision making using counterfactual
imagination models, as well as extensions of GANs using ideas from network
economics.  We show that research on imagination forms a nice synergy to
ongoing work on high fidelity complex simulation engines, representing
today’s forerunners to The Matrix, a “What if” eventual successor to
today’s “What is” search engines.

Bio:

Read more:
http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/colloquium/imagination-machines-today-we-goo... 
[1]


[1] 
http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/colloquium/imagination-machines-today-we-google-tomorrow-we-will-woz
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