Science & Cocktails: Max Welling on Artificial Intelligence + Pin Up Club

Event in English, semi-seated.
19:30 doors open for cocktails
20:30 Max Welling (talk)
21:40 Pin Up Club (live music)

Science & Cocktails is a series of public talks by scientists with live music and smoky dry-ice chilled cocktails in your hand. Max Welling will talk about artificial intelligence, its benefits and its threats. Afterwards, chilled cocktails and dark disco from Pin Up Club to help you think carefully about the future of humanity.

This spring there are more Science & Cocktails talks, check the full program here.

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Artificial Intelligence, Opportunity or Threat?

Should you be worried about progress in Artificial Intelligence? Will Artificial Intelligence destroy jobs? Should we fear killer robots? Does Artificial Intelligence threaten our very existence?

Artificial Intelligence is hailed as a technology as disruptive as electricity or the internet. This begs the question: how is AI going to transform society and impact our everyday lives? Max Welling will discuss the current state of the field, the technology itself, its benefits and its threats.

Will AI replace humans on the labour market? Is AI fair and objective or will it discriminate? Can we benefit from AI and at the same time retain our privacy? Will all our decisions be made by algorithms and what does that imply for our sense of free will? How easily can we be manipulated by algorithms and what does that mean for democracy? Will we all be interlinked and lose our sense of individuality? Will the boundary between the real and virtual world blur when augmented reality becomes real?

After this talk you may not have all the answers, but you will hopefully be better equipped to form an educated opinion.

About Max Welling

Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a research chair in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam and a VP Technologies at Qualcomm. He has a secondary appointment as a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He is co-founder of “Scyfer BV” a university spin-off in deep learning which got acquired by Qualcomm in summer 2017. In the past he held postdoctoral positions at Caltech (’98-’00), UCL (’00-’01) and the U. Toronto (’01-’03). He received his PhD in ’98 under supervision of Nobel laureate Prof. G. 't Hooft. Max Welling has served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015 (impact factor 4.8). He serves on the board of the NIPS foundation since 2015 (the largest conference in machine learning) and has been program chair and general chair of NIPS in 2013 and 2014 respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair of MIDL 2018. He has served on the editorial boards of JMLR and JML and was an associate editor for Neurocomputing, JCGS and TPAMI. He received multiple grants from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, NSF, NIH, NWO and ONR-MURI among which an NSF career grant in 2005. He is recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010. Welling is in the board of the Data Science Research Center in Amsterdam, he directs the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLAB), and co-directs the Qualcomm-UvA deep learning lab (QUVA) and the Bosch-UvA Deep Learning lab (DELTA). Max Welling has over 250 scientific publications in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics and an h-index of 54.

The dynamic producers duo known as Pin Up Club owes its name to a popular TV show from the eighties in which ordinary housewives were encouraged to get in touch with their sensual side. Inspired by their illustrious namesake, Amsterdam-based Josef van Galen and Jelle Imbos seduce their crowd by producing exhilarating live sets bursting with enchanting beats and filthy baselines. Clearly apparent in their trippy, left-field sound, are the EBM and dark disco influences that caused the pair to fall in love with producing music from the very beginning.

This event is an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) with the support of NWA Route 2.

Science & Cocktails Amsterdam is presented in cooperation with Paradiso and acknowledges the support of New Scientist.