Forum discusses future of AI

A themed forum on the development of brain science and artificial intelligence was held by the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) during the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in the city with scientists and executives of AI enterprises giving speeches and discussing the future of AI.

Alan Yuille, a mathematician and computer scientist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, gave a speech at the forum with a topic of "Vision as Bayesian Inference. A Historical Perspective." During the speech, he talked about the connection between computer vision and biological vision. It's based on a "dream" of British neuroscientist David Marr, which articulated in his book "Vision" that Computer Vision (CV) and Biological Vision (BV) could be studied together in a complimentary manner.

In Japanese computer scientist Makoto Sato's speech on "Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Reality," he showed the audience his early work "Kobito-Virtual Brownies-" project in which people can have haptic interaction with virtual creatures through real objects. In a video clip, a little virtual man "kobito" can "push" a tea caddy via the technology. He also gave a brief introduction on the history of virtual character of Japan with three examples – the virtual idol Date Kyoko, world famous virtual singer Hatsune Miku and virtual Youtuber Kizuna AI. In his view, when artificial reality plus virtual reality, there will be the next generation of artificial creature or "artificial human."

AI scientist and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of Citadel Deng Li discussed AI's role in financial market in his speech "From Modeling Speech and Language to Modeling Financial Markets" and Adam Gibson, co-founder of artificial intelligence/machine learning company Skymind brought the idea of "AI Cloud" in the speech "Next Gen AI Infrastructure for the Public AI Cloud."

Domestic scientists and entrepreneurs also had a round table discussion about the development on core technology of AI and the innovation in policy.