Every day we see articles in the media about artificial intelligence: some are optimistic, some pessimistic, and some complain about the hype! In this talk I will review some of the history of the field and in particular the shift in approach that has caused much of the recent wave of excitement.

Shane obtained his PhD from IDSIA in Switzerland, supervised by Prof. Marcus Hutter, the leading authority on theoretical models of super intelligent machines. His thesis proposed a formal definition of machine intelligence, for which he was awarded the $10,000 Canadian Singularity Institute research prize. He spent a post doctoral year at the Swiss Finance Institute building models of human decision making, followed by two years at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL studying the algorithmic organisation of the brain. In 2010 he co-founded DeepMind Technologies with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. After three years of rapid growth and a number of research breakthroughs, DeepMind was acquired by Google.

Guidance For Attendees:

Please arrive 15 minutes before the lecture starts as you will have to sign in to King's as a visitor. You need to enter Bush House via the South entrance on the Strand. Please also have your ticket ready to be scanned as this will determine how quickly we can fill the auditorium and begin the talk.