NYU Tandon School of Engineering Explores the State of Artificial Intelligence with New Seminar Series

BROOKLYN, New York – NYU Tandon School of Engineering will launch a seminar series addressing the most important new research in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), featuring researchers who have made fundamental contributions to the emerging technology.

Yann LeCun

The first event will feature Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of AI research and a member of the New York University faculty. LeCun will inaugurate the series on Tuesday, February 20, 2018, from 10 to 11 am in Downtown Brooklyn, at NYU Tandon’s Pfizer Auditorium, 5 MetroTech Center. Registration is free and open to all. His address, “Obstacles to Deep Learning and AI,” will explore a new frontier: predictive models that capture the “common sense” exhibited by humans and animals, who often learn by observation and occasional action.

LeCun’s pioneering work in the application of neural networks to computer vision and other AI areas led to products and services deployed across most technology companies.  He is also known for research in image compression technology. At NYU, LeCun is the founding director of the Center for Data Science, a Silver Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering, and an associate faculty member of the Center for Neural Science.

The seminar series, Modern Artificial Intelligence, is organized by Professor Anna Choromanska and hosted by NYU Tandon’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“At NYU Tandon, our goal is to contribute to building a better, smarter, more-connected world, and AI is becoming increasingly vital in that pursuit,” said Dean Katepalli R. Sreenivasan. “Thanks to faculty members like Anna Choromanska, academic centers like the new AI Now, and entrepreneurial efforts like the AI NexusLab, we are becoming a global center of influence in the AI arena, and I look forward to the new seminar series as a cornerstone of our efforts.”

“Artificial intelligence is now impacting all facets of life, and with applications in such areas as defense, robotics, and autonomous vehicles, it is of vast interest to a large and diverse research community,” Choromanska said. “It is imperative that AI researchers interact and collaborate to move forward the development of new machine learning techniques and technologies, and this new seminar series holds the potential for being an important venue for them.”

Subsequent seminars will feature Yoshua Bengio, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and an editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research; Stefano Soatto, founding director of the UCLA Vision Lab; and Vladimir Vapnik, the creator of the first support vector machine (SVM) algorithm.

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering
The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering technology in service to society. In addition to its main location in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon collaborates with other schools within NYU, the country’s largest private research university, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate program. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.