Nature of Intelligence

Autonomic Computing refers to the self-managing characteristics of distributed computing resources, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users.

7:30pm - Welcome & Networking (food & drinks sponsored by Corenova)
7:45pm - Jim Benvenuto - Intelligence Itself
8:45pm - Wrap-up & Networking (discuss future topics)

Topic:

This talk will present a relational perspective on AI. In a manner analogous to the discordance between the science we use to understand the world and how we view and understand ourselves as living beings there is a similar discordance between how we view our own intelligence and how we approach intelligence computationally in the field of AI.

The field of relational biology shows the short-comings of the traditional physics approach of using dynamical systems theory in trying to understand life and instead approaches life through the mathematics of category theory. Because of the deep correspondence between dynamical systems theory (used to understand physical systems) and automata theory (used to understand computational systems) the same approach sheds light on the nature of intelligence. The characteristics necessary for certain material systems to be considered a living organism have a direct correspondence to the characteristics necessary for certain material systems to be considered intelligent. We will use this perspective of relational biology to try to explicate some of these characteristics and see how they might apply to AI.

Presenter: Jim Benvenuto is an AI researcher building a system for understanding and responding to domain specific natural language to realize user goals. In his previous position he did DARPA and IARPA funded research on cognitive-neuroscience architectures for understanding sense making and knowledge representation in neural systems. He also worked on designing a cognitive control system for autonomous driving.

His MS is in computational neuroscience and PhD research involved building a system to answer queries about syntactic and semantic relationships within executing software.

Venue:

Dr. Sarathy from NGC has graciously opened up his venue again for our meetup group. We will be meeting at S-CAFE, which is part of the NGC Space Park Campus at Redondo Beach. The cafe is located at the ground level of the S Building, which is located next to the only tall E-2 Building with the NEON Northrop sign. The facility can host up to 100 attendees.

Parking: Free

Live Stream: https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/corenova.com/autonomic