Brighton Cafe Scientifique

AI - how far can we trust it? with Prof Julie Weeds, Wednesday 9th July, 7:30pm at Wagner Hall, West Street, Brighton

AI is becoming omnipresent in our lives - from its application in various recognition tasks (facial and fingerprint recognition, automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR), medical imaging diagnostics) to providing us with information or digital content through tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s AI overview or DeepAI’s image generator. This talk will introduce you to how the technology actually works including the foundations of neural networks, supervised learning and more recent generative models. However, whilst the possibilities for using AI seem endless and exciting, I will also discuss the limitations of the technology and the extent to which it can be trusted.
Julie Weeds is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex and Co-Director of SussexAI. She graduated with a first in Computer Science from Cambridge in 1998. She has an MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing from Cambridge (2000), a PhD in Natural Language Processing from the University of Sussex (2003) and a PGCE in Secondary Mathematics Teaching from Brighton University (2006). In 2016 she was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Sussex; she became a Professor in Artificial Intelligence in 2023. Her research is focussed on the representation of meaning in Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems and the application of such systems to the large scale analysis of social media and other document collections.

Times: Doors and bar open at 7:00pm, talk starts at 7:30. Short break at 8:15 followed by Q&A.

Wagner Hall is on West Street, 200 m down from the Clock Tower on the right-hand side, adjoining the Bright Helm pub and next to the entrance to the Churchill Square Orange car park. (You can still get in if your car isn't orange.)