News Releases

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab is hosting its inaugural AI Research Week, October 1-5, in Cambridge, MA. 

The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab is a joint research effort to drive fundamental advances in artificial intelligence. The lab opened one year ago as part of a 10-year, $240 million investment by IBM (NYSE: IBM). Today, the lab is spearheading 48 AI-related research projects.

WHAT:
AI Research Week is a technical gathering of AI researchers from around the world. It kicks off on Monday, Oct. 1, with a poster and networking session where researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and IBM's AI Horizons Network of university collaborators will showcase projects underway that are shaping the future of AI. These projects are focused on advancing AI capabilities and applications of AI to address a range of issues, from the prevention of food spoilage, to detection and defense against malware, to the fight against the opioid epidemic. 

On Tuesday, Oct. 2, Ananthan Chandrakasan, Dean of MIT's School of Engineering, and Dario Gil, COO of IBM Research and VP, AI and Quantum will kick off the AI Horizons Colloquium with a Welcome Address, followed by a full day of talks and discussion featuring AI experts from academia and industry. 

Other Colloquium speakers include:  

• Megan Smith, CEO of shift7 and the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States, will deliver a keynote on the theme of AI for shared prosperity, entitled "7 Billion Colleagues."
  
  
• Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, will chair a panel examining fairness in machine learning, which includes Francesca Rossi, Distinguished Research Staff Member and AI Ethics Global Leader at IBM Research.
  
  
• Josh Tenenbaum, professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, will discuss building machines that learn and think like people.
  
  
• Yoshua Bengio, full professor and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), University of Montreal, will present research on learning to understand language. Bengio will also join Peter Shor, Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, in a panel discussion on research directions at the intersection of AI and Quantum Computing.

The Colloquium will be livestreamed here.

On Thursday, Oct. 4, Women in Machine Learning (WiML) and IBM Research AI will launch a Boston-area community for women in machine learning and artificial intelligence, with the inaugural meetup at IBM's Cambridge Office, located at 75 Binney St, Cambridge. The quarterly meetups to follow will also feature technical seminars and workshops, along with career mentoring and networking discussions.

Rounding out the week will be a series of AI research workshops and networking opportunities. The full AI Research Week agenda and list of speakers can be found here.

WHO:
AI Research Week will bring together top AI researchers from IBM; MIT; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; the University of Michigan; the University of Montreal; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, along with students and researchers from across the Cambridge and Boston community. 

WHEN: 
October 1 – 5, 2018

WHERE: 
AI Research Week events will be held at MIT and IBM in Cambridge, MA. For specific locations and addresses, please check the schedule.

RSVP:
Media interested in attending the Poster Session, AI Horizons Colloquium and Women in Machine Learning meetup can RSVP by contacting: 

Linda Chung, IBM
917-226-8550
Linda.Chung1@IBM.com

Kim Martineau, MIT
kimmarti@mit.edu

SOURCE IBM