Big Debates, Successes, and Failures in Artificial Intelligence

Time:Wednesdays at 4:30
Location:CSE 203
Organizers:Tony Fader and Abe Friesen
Promotional Comic:Here.

This quarter's 590a seminar is going to be a series of discussions and talks about big debates, successes, and failures in the history of AI. Our primary goal is to get students excited about their work by giving them a historical perspective on current research in AI.

We'll be discussing topics like these:

Format

Each week, a disucssion leader will pick a topic and find some good reading material. They'll be responsible for summarizing the topic (10-15 minutes) and moderating a discussion. To keep things informal, the discussion leader should come equipped with questions and talking points, but no slides.

Schedule and Readings

Date Discussion Leader Topic
January 9 Tony and Abe The Chomsky-Norvig Debate: What is the role of statistics in AI?
Some other useful links:
January 16 Rob Gens A nice overview: Deep Learning Architectures for AI by Yoshua Bengio.

The "cat face" paper from Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng.
Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning

Some recent press:
A blog post talking about why deep belief networks make less sense for language than vision.
January 23 Morgan Dixon AI vs. HCI punchout
Direct manipulation vs. interface agents by Ben Shneiderman and Pattie Maes.

Some other readings from Morgan:
January 30 Adam Smith Discovery Systems and the Automation of Science

Computational Approaches to Scientific Discovery - Jeff Shrager and Patt Langley from 1990.

Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work - Douglas B. Lenat and John Seeley Brown, 1983.

Other readings from Adam:
February 6 Cynthia Matuszek The Cyc Project

Cyc: Toward Programs with Common Sense - Douglas B. Lenat, Ramanathan V Guha, Karen Pittman, Dexter Pratt, and Mary Shepherd. 1990.

Cynthia also sent out these links:
February 13 Richard Newcombe Intelligence Without Representation - Rodney A. Brooks, 1987.


More materials from Richard:
February 20 Dan Butler Reasoning with Cause and Effect - Judea Pearl, 1999.

Additional reading/watching from Dan:
February 27 Abe-n-Tony The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data by Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira.
March 6 Abe Is machine learning getting us to artificial intelligence?

Bite-sized blog post from Andrew Gelman and main paper by Duvenaud, Lloyd, Grosse, Tenenbaum, and Ghahramani, 2013.

March 13 John Doe-Smith What Is a Knowledge Representation? by Davis, Shrobe, and Szolovits, 1993.

Possible Topics

Here are some suggestsions for discussion topics, as well as resources to where good topics may be lurking.