On March 9th, NYU’s Center for Data Science hosted its first Data Science Showcase—in conjunction with the Stern School of Business—to highlight the interdisciplinary work in data science taking place across a wide range of departments at the University.
Professor Zaid Harchaoui, a Visiting Assistant Professor at CDS, kicked off the showcase with a presentation titled “The History of AI Research and its Public Perception.” It began by looking into the work of Norbert Wiener, considered to be the first researcher in field of cybernetics; cybernetics being the basis for machine learning and artificial intelligence. In his pioneering work in cybernetics research, Wiener described three crucial points that have come to also serve as the groundwork for artificial intelligence research. In Wiener’s view, an intelligent system or machine would function in the following ways:
1. Machines would solve problems in the same way that humans play a game of chess: one logical decision at a time.
2. A machine could improve upon itself.
These concepts serve as the basis of artificial intelligence, and also served as the basis for the main panel talk at the showcase. The panel featured NYU affiliated faculty, including: Ernest Davis, Vasant Dhar, Zaid Harchaoui, Yann LeCun, and Gary Marcus
The talk began with a discussion of Google’s latest artificial intelligence machine, AlphaGo, which can play the popular board game, Go, and recently beat the reigning world champion Go player in a five game match.
AlphaGo plays Go by using a combination of Reinforcement Learning, a Monte Carlo tree search, and convolutional neural networks. Many of the panelists considered the development paramount to IBM’s Deep Blue machine, a chess playing machine developed in the 1990s that eventually beat the world champion chess player. While the Deep Blue machine did not have a profound affect on society, it signaled a changing trend towards research focusing on artificial intelligence; in a similar vein, while AlphaGo has yet to have a profound affect on the world, it is certainly symbolic of the current progress researchers are making in the field of artificial intelligence.
The Panel Discussion was followed by a mixer where students, researchers, and faculty members were able to converse with each-other, and with the panelists.
Article by Rishabh Jain