16th February 2018 at 14.15 in D101: Jaakko Lehtinen

Our second colloquium of 2018 will be held on 16th of February. Our speaker will be Jaakko Lehtinen. Jaakko is both an associate professor at Aalto as well as a principal research scientist with NVIDIA Research.

We have invited him to speak to us to give a broader perspective on research in the natural sciences, and how it can make contact with industry. He will tell us about some of the ways in which machine learning combined with physical simulations can help to tackle hard problems in artificial intelligence, in a talk titled When you see x, say y.

Here is his abstract:

How do we make computers perceive the everyday world and deeply understand it just by looking at it? How do we build virtual agents and real robots that build on this perception and are able to move and interact with the world, including us humans, in a natural manner? In this talk, I’ll aim to get you excited about the currently accelerating congruence of physically-based simulation and machine learning in solving very hard problems in artificial intelligence. I’ll argue that the classic approach of “merely” learning from human-labeled examples is doomed – there is simply no way for us to cover all the variability in the real world with annotated examples – and that making use of interpretable models (simulators!) in the learning process is the way forward. I’ll give examples of my own work, as well as that of my close colleagues and collaborators, and other highlights from around the world.

After the 30 minute talk, there will be a cocktail reception. Welcome!

Update 23.2.2018: You can watch a video of Jaakko’s talk here [link updated 6.4.2018]: