The Future of AI in the Industrial and Physical World

Falling Walls Circle Tables are lending the spotlight to world-leading scientists, science strategists and policy-makers from academia, business and politics discuss how we can apply science, research and innovation to get the world moving again.

As technology advances, artificial intelligence begins to enter every aspect of our lives. In this Falling Walls Circle Table, the panel discusses how we can enhance the future of AI in the physical world, while protecting ourselves from the risks it poses.

Machine learning allows artificial intelligence to operate with minimal programming, but this learning comes with limitations. Physical situations frequently require that artificial intelligence can adapt as situations shift, and develop a complex understanding of the real world. For an efficient future of AI, we need to develop tools that can make inferences about cause, not just correlation. What’s more, we need to be able to peer inside, to understand why certain decisions are made.

Even today, artificial intelligence is an incredibly varied tool with applications everywhere. But the technology itself is neutral. It can be equally well applied for both positive and negative goals – something that governments, companies and even the general public must be mindful of.

Zulfikar Abbany is a Senior Science Editor and multimedia journalist for Germany’s international broadcaster, DW (Deutsche Welle). He has produced and presented events for the European XFEL, DESY and World Health Summit in Germany, DATA.SPACE in Glasgow and spoken at the Battle of Ideas in London. Before that he was in news and current affairs with Australia Network television and Radio Australia for the Asia Pacific region. He has written for New Scientist, The Independent, The Observer, Sydney Morning Herald and The (Melbourne) Age newspapers.

Dr. Andrew Ng is the CEO and Founder of Landing AI, an industrial AI company aiming to empower customers to jumpstart AI and realize practical value. One of the Landing AI’s core products is LandingLens, an end-to-end AI platform specifically designed for industrial customers to build and effectively deploy AI-powered visual inspection solutions. Dr. Ng is a globally recognized leader in AI. He has helped two of the world’s leading technology companies in their “AI transformation”: He was Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led the company’s ~1300 person AI Group and was responsible for driving the company’s global AI strategy and infrastructure. He was also the founding lead of the Google Brain team. Dr. Ng is also Co-Chairman and Co-founder of Coursera, the world’s leading MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. Dr. Ng has authored or co-authored over 100 research papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields. In 2013, he was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential persons in the world. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

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