Thoughts on AI via my talks at FOSSAsia

Over the years, I’ve had opportunities to present my thoughts and discuss issues around Artificial Intelligence. As it turns out all of the ones that I have a recording of were at the long running FOSSAsia Summit.

I thought it would be useful to put them all in one place.

For additional context: I first got involved in AI back in Oregon State University when I was in graduate school in 1988. I was doing my MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in AI. My prof and I were exploring projects such as tracking in a 3D space (a forest to be specific) and to have code that the “avatars” (although I don’t think we used that word then) would try to find it’s way around the forest to get to some location. These projects received funding from DARPA (at least that was what I was told). We used Lisp as the primary language and did the work on a Sequent Computer Systems running modified form of 4.2BSD Unix called Dynamic Unix (Dynix). Trivia: Lisp was created by John McCarthy (yes, the same chap who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence in 1959) – I talk about the history of AI in the third video below. I was fascinated with the Sequent system. It was able to have dozens of users logged in concurrently (perhaps 128? who knows?). Oregon State was on ARPANet and we had both UUCP and leased line connections that went via HP Corvallis’ location (perhaps there were more, but I only knew of the HP Corvallis link).

I did not get to do very much more with that AI project as my interest was with VLSI chip design. All of those for another post.

Suffice to say, I parked AI on one side and jumped into software and hardware systems as the software was crucial to enabling the hardware to be useful. And as Linux and free software (that was what it was called before the words “open source” was coined in 1998) available software began flourishing in the new nascent Internet (having been cut free from ARPANet and NSFnet), I got increasingly involved with that.

Back to the purpose of this post, here’s a list of three talks and one panel discussion on AI:

1: From FOSSAsia 2017 Singapore, this was my opening keynote, entitled “AI and Machine Learning Personal Assistants”

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVSGTKVos80

2: Also from FOSSAsia 2017, an AI Panel with Andrew Selle of Google Brain Team, Steffen Braun of KI Group, Michael Christen of SUSI AI and Andrew “bunnie” Huang of Chibtronics.