Abstract: I will discuss the evolution of the artificial intelligence (AI) field, from the mid-80s to today, largely based on my personal perspective on computer vision and robotics research, having lived through both the "winter" of AI and its recent resurgence in a modern form. The latter is due, in large part, to advances in machine learning, but also to key scientific progress in related disciplines such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech understanding and, of course, robotics, as well as an explosion of industrial interest and a new synergy between academic and industrial research. I will argue that robotics (and not just learning-based robotics) has a key role to play in the current AI revolution, and will conclude by discussing some ideas for implementing this vision as we prepare for a new (re) integrated AI.
Bio: Jean Ponce is a Research Director at Inria and a Visiting Researcher at the NYU Center for Data Science, on leave from Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) / PSL Research University, where he is a Professor, and served as Director of the Computer Science department from 2011 to 2017. Dr. Ponce graduated in Mathematics from ENS Cachan in 1982. He received his "Doctorat de Troisieme cycle" (PhD degree) and his "Doctorat d'Etat" (Habilitation degree) in Computer Science in 1983 and 1988 from the University of Paris Sud Orsay. Before joining ENS and Inria, Jean Ponce held positions at MIT, Stanford, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a Full Professor until 2005. Jean Ponce's research spans Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Robotics. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Sr. Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He served as editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Computer Vision from 2003 to 2008, and chaired the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 1997 and 2000, and the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2008. Jean Ponce is the recipient of two US patents, an ERC Advanced Grant, and the 2016 IEEE CVPR Longuet-Higgins Prize. He is also the author of "Computer Vision: A Modern Approach", a textbook translated in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, and he is (slowly) writing a new textbook, "Geometric Foundations of Computer Vision".
