Events

Recordings are now posted from the talks in which researchers from MIT's Quest for Intelligence and its science driver — the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines — shared the latest progress on understanding natural intelligence and how we aim to use that scientific progress to drive the future of AI and other impact areas. We were happy to welcome supporters, industry collaborators, and members of the MIT community to a day-long series of presentations and conversations about our vision, our most recent progress, and the future of research on the Science and Engineering of Intelligence.

George Konidaris is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and director of the Intelligent Robot Lab at Brown, which forms part of bigAI (Brown Integrative, General AI). He is also the Chief Roboticist of Realtime Robotics, a startup based on his research on robot motion planning. Konidaris focuses on understanding how to design agents that learn abstraction hierarchies that enable fast, goal-oriented planning. He develops and applies techniques from machine learning, reinforcement learning, optimal control and planning to construct well-grounded hierarchies that result in fast planning for common cases, and are robust to uncertainty at every level of control.

Sizhe Yuen is a final year PhD Student at the University of Southampton. His work focuses on the development of Evolutionary Algorithms using modern biological concepts from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. This talk will focus on the concept of epigenetic inheritance. Using a contemporary biological framework based on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, epigenetic inheritance is shown as a missing gap despite being a key building block in modern interpretations of how evolution occurs.