Distinguished Lecture at UTS

Artificial Intelligence Supremacy: Will Australia win or lose in an AI-world

INVITATION - ALL WELCOME

Event Details
5.00pm October 10, 2018
Aerial Centre, Level 7, Building 10, 235 Jones St, Ultimo, NSW 2007 Faculty of engineering and IT University of Technology Sydney

Please join us for the Faculty of Engineering and IT Distinguished Lecture Series featuring Distinguished Professor Mary-Anne Williams, Director of the Magic Lab at UTS and leading international expert on Artificial Intelligence. Mary-Anne works with business, industry, government and the United Nations on the strategic impact of Artificial Intelligence.

RSVP October 2 for catering purposes email: Renee.Estrella@uts.edu.au

Artificial intelligence (AI) that can enhance, improve and scale human expertise is profoundly changing our lives. It is transforming how we perceive and interact with the physical and digital worlds shaping our experiences, beliefs and choices. AI is poised to disrupt industries, economies and geopolitics.

Australia is surprisingly well positioned to seize the new opportunities for innovation and prosperity that AI technologies can bring. The AI Race is not a technology competition, it's a race to attract strategic investment and amass AI talent. It's a race we simply cannot afford to ignore as Australian business and our national digital borders become increasingly vulnerable to the power and influence of AI. Our major trading partners have already declared their ambitions to be AI leaders making substantial investments. Now is the time for Australia to take bold strategic action.

Today, AI can process vast amounts of data and outperform human experts in a growing array of tasks. However, it is far from perfect. AI reflects the bias in human decision-making, and lacks robust engineering practices to ensure its safe application. As AI has become more pervasive in business and society, leaders inside and outside the field raise concerns, calling for more accountable, transparent and explainable AI.
This talk will explore the capabilities and impact of state-of-the-art AI and Robotics. It will identify the major challenges and significant risks confronting Australia as we seek to seize our future in the new AI world order.


Mary-Anne Williams is a Distinguished Professor and Director of The Magic Lab in the Centre of AI at UTS. She listed on Robohub's top 25 women in robotics. She has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and a Master of Laws. Mary-Anne is a Fellow at Stanford University, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), and the Australian Computer Society (ACS). She is a leading authority on AI and Robotics with transdisciplinary expertise in Autonomous Decision Making, Machine Learning, Cybersecurity, AI and Law, Disruptive Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Mary-Anne leads academic engagement on the Innovation Reference Group for the South West Sydney Local Health District. She has served on the ARC College of Experts, and chaired the ARC Excellence in Research for Australia Committee that undertook a national evaluation of research in Mathematics, Information and Computing Sciences in 2012. She was Guest Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China for a decade, and Review Editor for the prestigious Artificial Intelligence Journal for 8 years. Mary-Anne is a non-executive director of the US-based Scientific Foundation KR Inc, Conference Chair of the International Conference on Social Robotics in 2014, the RoboCup Symposium 2018 in Sydney. She continues to serve on the Editorial Board for AAAI/MIT Press, the Information Systems Journal, International Journal of Social Robotics and the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award Committee for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. Mary-Anne has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships including IBM Faculty Award. 

Mary-Anne has a passion for innovation in science, technology, engineering and law. She established and continues to lead Australia's leading Social Robotics research team at UTS, which includes Steve Wozniak, Peter Gardenfors and Henri Prade. This team works in partnership with CBA and Softbank Social Robotics. The team's research objective is to bring science fiction to reality through the design of intelligent autonomous technologies that can learn and adapt as they interact and help ordinary people.