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Past talk · AI/ML Seminar Series

AI can Learn from Data. But can it Learn to Reason?

Guy Van den Broeck

Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles

Date & time
Monday, May 15, 2023 · 1:00 PM
Location
Donald Bren Hall 4011

Abstract

Many expect that AI will go from powering chatbots to providing mental health services, from advertisement to deciding who is given bail. The expectation is that AI will solve society's problems by simply being more intelligent than we are. Implicit in this bullish perspective is the assumption that AI will naturally learn to reason from data: that it can form trains of thought that make sense, similar to how a mental health professional or judge might reason about a case, or how a mathematician might prove a theorem. This talk will investigate whether this behavior can be learned from data, and how we can design the next generation of AI techniques that can achieve such capabilities, focusing on neuro-symbolic learning and tractable deep generative models.

About the speaker

Guy Van den Broeck is an Associate Professor and Samueli Fellow at UCLA, in the Computer Science Department, where he directs the StarAI lab. His research interests are in Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Artificial Intelligence. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, and the IJCAI-19 Computers and Thought Award.