Opening Ceremony, Networking, Cocktail Reception, Keynote, and Expert Panel

Erik Horvitz

Technical Fellow and Managing Director, Microsoft Research

Talk: AI Advances and Aspirations

Abstract: Artificial intelligence is at an inflection point, powered by a confluence of several factors, including leaps in computational capabilities, growth in data resources, and advances in algorithms. After sharing reflections about the long-term pursuit of artificial intelligence, I will focus on recent developments in AI and on opportunities and hard challenges ahead. I will discuss key aspirations spanning theory and practice, including the pursuit of more general artificial intelligence, the mastery of human-AI collaboration, and on understanding and addressing the influences of AI advances on people and society.

Bio: Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow and director of Microsoft Research. His lifelong curiosity about brains and minds has fueled his pursuit of principles of computational intelligence. Beyond theory, his has worked to field AI advances in the open world, with the joint goals of exploring the behavior of systems in realistic settings and of developing applications that can enhance the quality of peoples' lives. He received the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and has been elected fellow of the AAAI, ACM, NAE and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Additional background and publications can be accessed at http://erichorvitz.com.

Alan Mackworth

Computer Science, UBC

Bio: Alan Mackworth is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He was educated at Toronto (B.A.Sc.), Harvard (A.M.) and Sussex (D.Phil.). He works on constraint-based artificial intelligence with applications in vision, robotics, situated agents, assistive technology and sustainability. He is known as a pioneer in the areas of constraint satisfaction, robot soccer, hybrid systems and constraint-based agents. He has authored over 130 papers and co-authored two books: Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach (1998) and Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents(2010; 2nd Ed. 2017). He served as the founding Director of the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, and as President of CAIAC, IJCAI, and AAAI. He is a Fellow of AAAI, CAIAC, CIFAR and the Royal Society of Canada.

Erik Horvitz

Technical Fellow and Managing Director, Microsoft Research

Bio: Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow and director of Microsoft Research. His lifelong curiosity about brains and minds has fueled his pursuit of principles of computational intelligence. Beyond theory, his has worked to field AI advances in the open world, with the joint goals of exploring the behavior of systems in realistic settings and of developing applications that can enhance the quality of peoples' lives. He received the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Prize for contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and has been elected fellow of the AAAI, ACM, NAE and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Additional background and publications can be accessed at http://erichorvitz.com.

Gail Murphy

UBC Vice-President Research & Innovation

Bio: Dr. Murphy is a Professor in UBC’s Department of Computer Science and was formerly Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science. After completing her B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 1987, she worked for five years as a software engineer in the Lower Mainland. She later pursued graduate studies in computer science at the University of Washington, earning first an M.Sc. (1994) and then a Ph.D (1996).

Dr. Murphy joined UBC in 1996 and was a key driver of the new Masters of Data Science, a professional graduate program launched in 2017—and has been instrumental in championing the creation of a Data Science Institute at the university. She also maintains an active research group with post-doctoral and graduate students.

Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist, as well as co-founder, board member and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated.

Kevin Murphy

Research Scientist, Google

Bio: Kevin Murphy is a research scientist at Google in Mountain View, California, where he works on AI, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language understanding. Before joining Google in 2011, he was an associate professor (with tenure) of computer science and statistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Before starting at UBC in 2004, he was a postdoc at MIT. Kevin got his BA from U. Cambridge, his MEng from U.Pennsylvania, and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He has published over 80 papers in refereed conferences and journals, as well as an 1100-page textbook called "Machine Learning: a Probabilistic Perspective" (MIT Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 DeGroot Prize for best book in the field of Statistical Science. Kevin was also the (co) Editor-in-Chief of JMLR (the Journal of Machine Learning Research) 2014-2017.

Mark Schmidt PhD'10

Computer Science, UBC

Bio: Mark Schmidt has been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia since 2014, and is a Canada Research Chair and Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. His research focuses on developing faster algorithms for large-scale machine learning, with an emphasis on methods with provable convergence rates and that can be applied to structured prediction problems. From 2011 through 2013 he worked at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris on inexact and stochastic convex optimization methods. He finished his M.Sc. in 2005 at the University of Alberta working as part of the Brain Tumor Analysis Project, and his Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of British Columbia working on graphical model structure learning with L1-regularization. He has also worked at Siemens Medical Solutions on heart motion abnormality detection, with Michael Friedlander in the Scientific Computing Laboratory at the University of British Columbia on semi-stochastic optimization methods, and with Anoop Sarkar at Simon Fraser University on large-scale training of natural language models.

Kirsten Sutton

Managing Director, SAP Vancouver

Bio: Kirsten is an unconventional tech leader who navigated a significant career pivot from professionally trained chef to become one of Vancouver’s most celebrated tech execs. As Vice President and Managing Director of SAP Labs Canada, Kirsten is one of only two women holding this position within the global SAP Labs Network. She is also the Global Head of Engineering for SAP Jam, leading a multinational development team creating a cloud-based social collaboration platform with over 47 million subscribers. An advocate for girls in tech, she supports initiatives like Templeton STEM and GIRLsmarts4tech, and has led SAP Canada’s adoption of Autism@Work, an initiative to hire 650 individuals on the autism spectrum globally. Kirsten was named one of the 2018 Influential Women in Business by Business in Vancouver, is chair of Minerva BC and serves as a director of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade.