On November 4, we were pleased to be able to invite Gao Yang, professor, doctoral supervisor and deputy director of the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, to speak to the students.
After being introduced by Dean Wang Wei, Professor Gao started with the “social hotspot” of the human-computer war and led to the topic of Turing Test. Through going over the 1956 Dartmouth conference, a landmark event on artificial intelligence (AI), and the stories of important figures at the conference, he discussed three major technologies of AI (knowledge, reasoning and learning) and the next-generation breakthrough technology, the multi-agent system.
Throughout the lecture, Gao introduced the academic topics through the presentation of social hotspots. He hinted at the direction of AI development with specific examples. He reviewed the history of AI development with stories of key AI figures such as McCathy, Minsky, and Sima He. Because of this, when students were looking back on the history of AI, they can focus on the present and think about the future.
When describing the difficulties encountered in the AI development, Gao also pointed out its possible development needs, that is, to develop and grow in the field of interdisciplinary collaboration. Gao not only focused on academics, but also explained the various aspects of AI in industry and entrepreneurship, and the students found him full of useful information.
Through the lecture, students not only gained extensive knowledge about AI’s history, development and technology, but also broadened their horizons and gained a better grasp of the direction of AI’s development. Many questions and topics in the lecture inspired students to do further thinking and gave them room for imagination. As the closing remark of the lecture goes, “Turing Test serves as the perpetual motion machine that drives the development of AI, but what is human intelligence?
At the end of the lecture, some students threw out practical topics such as self-driving cars and posed some questions about the ethics and laws of AI, and Professor Gao gave detailed answers.
