- To: Joel David Hamkins <jdh@hamkins.org>
- Subject: Two GC talks this week by John McCarthy, "the father of artificial intelligence"
- From: Joel David Hamkins <hamkins@nylogic.org>
- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 19:12:18 -0400
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue
There will be two talks this week by Professor John McCarthy
of Stanford, known as "the father of artificial intelligence".
Wednesday, September 25, 11 am - 1 pm, GC Room C197
Special Session of the Computational Logic Seminar
Useful Counterfactuals
The talk will be based on Costello and McCarthy of that title, in ETAI or
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/counterfactuals.html and Actions
and other events in situation calculus - in KR 2002 and
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/sitcalc.html.
Thursday, September 26, 4:15pm, GC Martin E. Segal Theater
GC Computer Science Colloquium
The Logical Path to Human-Level Artificial Intelligence
When AI research started in the 1950s, all the pioneers took human-level AI as
the goal. A few thought it would be achieved soon, but most were non-committal.
As ought to have been expected, understanding intelligence well enough to
program computers to have human-level AI has proved difficult. This still needs
to be the goal even though some developers have proposed to redefine AI in more
limited ways. Research in AI needs to be measured in terms of how it contributes
to human-level AI.
This lecture will emphasize the logical approach to AI, i.e. representing
information about the world by logical sentences and using programmed logical
reasoning to decide what to do. Along this path there are many problems to be
solved. Some of them are the frame problem (pretty well solved), properly
formalizing nonmonotonic reasoning, the qualification problem and the
ramification problem, and the problem of getting elaboration tolerant
formalisms.
These problems arise in any approach to AI but haven't yet been noticed by some
of the recent advocates of probabilistic formalisms.
Professor John McCarthy, Stanford University, known as the "father of artificial
intelligence." He originated the LISP programming language for computing with
symbolic expressions, was one of the first to propose and design time-sharing
computer systems, and pioneered in using mathematical logic to prove the
correctness of computer programs. He has also written papers on the social
implications of computer and other technology.
He received the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery in
1971 for his contributions to computer science. He received the first Research
Excellence Award of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in
1985. He received the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the National Medal of Science in
1990. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National
Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences.
The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the CUNY Faculty
Development Program, Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Royal Philips
Electronics.
(Apologies for multiple receipts of these announcements.)