Scientific and Practical Challenges of Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Randy Goebel

Fellow and co-founder, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, University of Alberta

R.G. (Randy) Goebel is currently both a professor of Computing Science in the Department of Computing Science and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, at the University of Alberta. He is also a Fellow and co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Dr. Goebel received a B.Sc. (Computer Science), M.Sc. (Computing Science), and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from the Universities of Regina, Alberta, and British Columbia, respectively. Dr. Goebel has previously held faculty appointments at the University of Waterloo, University of Tokyo, Multimedia University (Kuala Lumpur), and Hokkaido University (Sapporo), and visiting researcher engagements at National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo), DFKI (Germany), and NICTA (Australia). Dr Goebel is also actively involved in collaborative research projects in Canada, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, and China.

The popularity of the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created a lot of misconceptions about what it is and is not. Dr. Randy Goebel will provide an accessible high-level view of some of these misconceptions: whether the scientific pursuit of AI is about replacing or augmenting humans; where the public perception fails; what the foundational scientific challenges are; and, where are the immediate high societal value applications.