Internationally-known #AI expert and visiting professor at Cornell University, Ron Brachman joined us for a Distinguished Lecturer Seminar about AI and common sense on Wednesday, April 24, 2024 at Northeastern University.

In his talk, Brachman explored the importance of common sense in AI systems, the role it plays in #cognition and more.

Check out Brachman's slides here: https://ai.northeastern.edu/event/giv...

Abstract:
With AI’s recent leaps forward, there is immense excitement about its potential and its burgeoning application. But despite demonstrating some amazing capabilities, AI systems continue to make unexpected, unhumanlike blunders, making their behavior worrisomely unpredictable and undermining our trust in them in real-world situations. Surprising gaffes by chatbots and bizarre actions by “self-driving” cars reveal that they just don’t have what we would call common sense.

So how can we fix this problem? In this talk, Ron Brachman shows how we might take some first steps. He begins by examining what it means to have common sense, exploring the role it plays in cognition. Brachman illustrates when and how common sense comes into play and talks about how to start building a common sense capability, based in part of work that has been underway in AI for a number of years, and on a novel bigger-picture approach to the architecture of an artificial cognitive system.

The talk concludes with some discussion about the criticality of common sense in two key challenges: the intelligibility of intentions and actions in AI systems, and the crucial ability – noticeably lacking in current systems – to take advice and act on it. Brachman makes the case that AI systems without common sense should never be allowed to act autonomously in the world, and that AI still has a rich set of under-addressed research problems that it needs to tackle. The talk is not technical and uses numerous easily-understood examples from the everyday world.

Find out more about The Institute for Experiential AI: https://ai.northeastern.edu/

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