(Updated 15.08.23)
Prof. Melanie Mitchell is giving this year's Margaret Boden Lecture titled "Abstraction and Analogy: Keys to robust Artificial Intelligence"
We can now confirm that responding to her talk will be Dr Ryan Burnell and Winnie Street.
Winnie Street is a Senior Researcher at Google Research. Her work is focused on evaluating the cognitive capabilities of large language models, particularly for evidence of social intelligence, and assessing the practical and ethical significance of those capabilities. She has a background in anthropology and software development, and previously worked on privacy and ambient computing. She is broadly interested in the relationships between consciousness, intelligence, and sociality, and how they might be understood through comparative studies of artificial and natural systems.
Dr Ryan Burnell is an associate of CFI and a Senior Research Associate working on the Foundation Models project at the Alan Turing Institute. His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, where he is working to apply theories and paradigms from cognitive science to develop more robust ways of evaluating AI systems. At the Turing Institute, Ryan is working to build tools that researchers and policymakers can use to understand the common-sense reasoning abilities of foundation models.
Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh will now chair the event (previously scheduled to be a respondant). Sean was the founding Executive Director of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), an academic research centre focused on global risks associated with emerging technologies and human activity. He is now the Project lead of a CSER-CFI cross centre program for AI:FAR. Seán’s research spans technology policy, catastrophic risk, horizon-scanning and foresight, genomics, bioengineering and artificial intelligence.
