Sebastian Risi: Growing Adaptive and Self-Assembling Machines

The talk given by Sebastian Risi in KUIS AI Talks on March 19, 2024.
Title: Growing Adaptive and Self-Assembling Machines
Abstract:
Despite all their recent advances, current AI methods are often still brittle and fail when confronted with unexpected situations. By incorporating collective intelligence ideas, we have recently been able to create neural networks that self-organize their weights for fast adaptation, machines that can recognize their own shape, and machines that self-assemble through local interactions alone. Additionally, in this talk I will present initial results from my GROW-AI ERC project, where we are developing neural networks that grow through a developmental process that mirrors key properties of embryonic development in biological organisms. The talk concludes with future research opportunities and challenges that we need to address to best capitalize on the same ideas that allowed biological intelligence to strive.
Short Bio:
Sebastian Risi is a Full Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen where he directs the Creative AI Lab, and co-directs the Robotics, Evolution and Art Lab (REAL). Before joining ITU, he did a postdoc at Cornell University and before that, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida. As one of the pioneers in the emerging field of collective intelligence for deep learning, he investigates how we can make current AI approaches more robust and adaptive. He has won several international scientific awards, including multiple best paper awards, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2022, the Distinguished Young Investigator in Artificial Life 2018 award, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2019, and an Amazon Research Award in 2020. His interdisciplinary work has been published in major machine learning, artificial life, and human-computer interaction conferences, including AAAI, NeurIPS, ICLR, Nature Machine Intelligence, ALIFE, GECCO, and CHI.