Artificial Intelligence
Humans, we won’t destroy you, The Guardian 2020
Prof. Luca Maria Gambardella
Artificial Intelligence is a very young field but one that is extremely dynamic and fascinating. Back in 1956 a group of American researchers led by John McCarthy (1927-2011) during a conference speculated about creating within two months a machine that could simulate every aspect of human learning and intelligence. What point are we at today? We run through the various phases of this challenge starting from the earliest attempts at automatic translation from one language to another through the manipulation of symbols, down to the most recent results that use a completely new and different approach: to create an artificial brain made of neurons and electrical synapses and teach it with examples. Using this methodology the UK newspaper The Guardian published an entire article written by AI: “A Robot wrote this entire article, are you scared yet human?".
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Luca Maria Gambardella
Gambardella is Pro-Rector for Innovation and Corporate Relations, full professor at the Faculty of Informatics and member of IDSIA, Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence USI-SUPSI which he directed from 1995 to 2020. He teaches the Artificial Intelligence module at the Faculty of Informatics of USI where he directs the Master in Artificial Intelligence. His main research and publishing interests are in the areas of machine learning, simulation, swarm robotics, metaheuristics, applied to academic and real world problems. In particular, he has studied and developed recognized optimization algorithms inspired by colony behavior (Ant Colony Optimization) to solve transport, assignment and scheduling problems. He acts as guest editor and reviewer for the most important magazines in his field. He is responsible for projects for the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Hasler Foundation, Innosuisse, the European Commission and industry. To date (December 2020) he has published more than 300 publications. According to Google scholar his h-index is 72 and his articles have received more than 58,000 citations. He has been a member of the BRIDGE (Swiss CTI-FNS) Discovery Evaluation Panel since 2016. He won the SNF Optimus Agora Award in 2018 for the SNF project "Introducing People to Research in Robotics through an Extended Peer Community in Southern Switzerland" and the Swiss ICT Award 2016. In the private sector he holds the role of Co-Founder & CTO Head of Applied AI at Artificialy SA, a company based in Lugano that deals with projects and solutions in the field of artificial intelligence. In the artistic field he has co-realized in the Lugano-Besso pedestrian tunnel "NeuralRope#1. Inside an Artificial Brain" (2019), a permanent interactive installation of 100 meters reproducing an artificial neural network. "Il suono dell’alba" La Feluca Edizioni, 2019 is his latest novel.