AAII Research Seminar Series | Seminar 3: Prof Victor Solo

The UTS AAII Research Seminar Series | Seminar 3

The UTS AAII Research Seminar series is dedicated to fostering an engaging, inclusive, and interdisciplinary environment for internal and external AI researchers to share research ideas and findings in person. Our goal is to promote cross-lab communications and achieve visionary collaborations. 

The series will encompass a wide range of AI topics, spanning from theoretical foundations to cutting-edge methodological development, cross-disciplinary applications, and insights from industry practices. 

With a monthly cadence, this seminar series will offer valuable opportunities to invite world-renowned visiting scholars to share their latest research frontiers, mentor AAII’s middle and early career researchers with the guidance for research leadership, and educate HDR students to hone their presentation and communication skills to excel in their academic journeys.

Topic: Control Engineering, Signal Processing, Neuroimaging and AI Scepticism

Abstract: The talk is in two parts. In the first part, we give a brief overview of some of the research activities in my lab but in a way that sets things up for the second part. Topics include adaptive control, adaptive signal processing, neural coding, and neuroimaging. In the second part, we take on the hype that AI is the solution to all problems. We argue that: The hype is enabled by pervasive and grossly misleading language; The 'data-driven' mentality is pre-scientific; expertise are claimed to belong to other research domains; AI is not remotely comparable to human intelligence; There are no unifying principles that would support the hype. We finish on a constructive note by discussing how Reinforcement Learning can be made safe by recognizing that it is a part of Control Engineering. 

Speaker: Prof Victor Solo (UNSW, Australia)

Professor Victor Solo (v.solo@unsw.edu.au) received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; two degrees (both first class honors) from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia: a B.Sc. degree in statistics and a B.E. degree in mechanical engineering; and his Ph.D. degree from the Australian National University, Canberra. He is a professor of electrical engineering at UNSW and a Fellow of the IEEE and American Statistical Association. He is also a faculty member in the Massachusetts General Hospital-Massachusetts Institute of Technology–Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, a part of the Radiology Department at Harvard Medical School. He has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Journal of Econometric Theory.
 
 

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