Tomaso Poggio, Director of CBMM, participated in a panel discussion entitled “Il linguaggio degli umani e quello delle macchine -  Human language and machine language”, as part of the Rome Science Festival 2014. Dr. Poggio’s talk included an overview of the Center’s vision and goals.

Il linguaggio degli umani e quello delle macchine

Sunday, January 26, 2014, Sala Petrassi
Introduction: Vittorio Bo (in Italian)
Talks: Stuart Shieber and Tomaso Poggio (both talks are in English)

Can machines be intelligent, thinking things? And how would we know if they were? The question of mechanical intelligence is an old question, and human language has played the central role perhaps as far back as the Babylonian Talmud; through the philosophy of Rene Descartes; to the eponymous test of mathematician Alan Turing, the founder of computer science. In this session, Stuart Shieber will retrace this history and describe the controversies that have embroiled the question of how intelligence can be determined. Tomaso Poggio, will instead accompany us in a journey of the future of artificial intelligence. With examples from his own research on artificial intelligence at MIT, he will tell us how a successful research plan for understanding intelligence could be carried out. Starting from a discussion of today’s AI technologies, such as Watson, Siri, Orcam and MobilEye, which are impressive, yet still confined to a single domain or task, he will show us how truly intelligent systems — systems that understand broadly — could change our world.

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Dr. Poggio’s talk begins at marker 38:04.