Seminar ERC : Artificial Intelligence and the Media

Nello Cristianini, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the university of Bristol, will give a talk in English, thursday 31st may 2018 at 5:30 PM in amphitheater Alain Beretz (Nouveau Patio building) in Strasbourg.

Title : Artificial Intelligence and the Media

Abstract : The combination of machine learning and big data has enabled us to create a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI), and now we interact with its applications daily. The strategic position occupied by AI agents within our global information infrastructure means that they are in the position to observe a large portion of our activities, learning from them, but also creates a new type of risk, including the possibility of surveillance and manipulation of user behaviour.
Based on the details of how AI has emerged from the combination of machine learning and this unified data infrastructure, we can understand recent reports that have raised concerns, from fake news to psychometric election targeting, from criminal justice applications to dynamic pricing in insurance based on social media content. By reviewing the way this technology works, we can put these reports in a context, and look ahead at forthcoming challenges. Importantly, we can plan future regulation of this strategic sector.

Bio : Nello Cristianini is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Bristol. His current research covers the large-scale analysis of media content (news and social media), using various AI methods, the design of new AI methods, their application to digital humanities and computational social science, and the social impact of Big Data and AI technologies. Cristianini is the co-author of two widely known books in machine learning, An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Kernel Methods for Pattern Analysis, as well as a book in bioinformatics, Introduction to Computational Genomics. He is also a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and a current holder of a European Research Council Advanced Grant. In 2014, Thomson-Reuters included him in a list of the most influential computer scientists of the decade. Before joining the University of Bristol, he has been a professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis. Currently, he is working on social and ethical implications of AI.

This seminar has been validated by the MSII doctoral school.