We live in a time of convergence of human and machine. Our human experience is augmented by machine applications, from internet-enabled sensors to human-assistive robotics, while we imbue our machines with human qualities, including context-awareness, vision and artificial intelligence (AI).
As technology brings us and our computers into an ever more seamless existence, we seek to understand our place in the complex relationship between human and machine intelligence. Enter UC Santa Barbara’s new Mellichamp Academic Initiative in Mind & Machine Intelligence, a multi-year research effort made possible by a generous gift from Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp and ledy by Miguel Eckstein, UCSB professor in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and William Wang, a natural-language-processing expert in the Department of Computer Science.
On February 19 and 20, the public is invited to discussions of the questions around mind and machine intelligence in two talks presented as part of a workshop to kick off the new intiative. The hour-long lectures will begin at 5 p.m. in the campus’s Marine Science Institute auditorium. The lectures are free and open to the public, although registration is encouraged.
Photograph by Matt Perko