Artificial Intelligence (AI) past, present & future: free public lecture by Dr John Flackett

The past decade has produced exciting and somewhat unexpected progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet, it’s not that long ago that lack of funding almost stopped AI in its tracks. Known as the ‘AI Winter’, businesses discovered that state-of-the-art AI systems were brittle and difficult to scale.

Recently, the age-old debate about the best approach for achieving [real] AI has been reignited as some deep Learning (DL) systems fail to live up to the original hype. An ever-increasing number of AI researchers are taking a fresh look at both symbolic and connectionist architectures and are exploring more hybrid solutions.

This lecture by visiting guest Dr John Flackett explores the current uptake of AI and whether we’re in another AI bubble. John uses his AI research experience and his current work at AiLab to take a critical look at the AI landscape to see if there are approaches from the past that can help propel the AI of the future.

Dr John Flackett: Co-founder/Head AiLab

Dr. John Flackett is a speaker, educator, advisor and business founder. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is John’s passion, and has been an integral part of his career via research, business and education. John is interested in numerous aspects of AI and cognitive science, in particular; representational adequacies, natural language processing (NLP), feature extraction, signal fusion and hybrid systems.

With 20+ years of AI experience, John’s worked in a wide range of industries (including banking, engineering and education) and was previously a senior academic for 10 years, lecturing in masters and undergraduate Artificial Intelligence and undergraduate Software Engineering and Computer Studies at a UK university. An expert in his field, John has achieved a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (machine learning and natural language processing), PgC in Research and BSc (Hons) in Computer Studies (1st class).

John migrated from the UK to Australia in 2006, where he co-founded his first company, koolth (a smart web specialist company) and his second business AiLab (www.ailab.com.au). With a background in providing AI education, research and developing internal AI solutions for over a decade (specialising in fundamental algorithm research to create better learning machines), AiLab assists industry, academia, government and community in learning and navigating AI through workshops, research, resources, policy and events.

An international speaker for many years, John regularly runs workshops and presents around the world speaking about AI, future jobs and emerging technology. He is also co-founder and organiser of the popular Adelaide AI meetup series in Australia and Hampshire AI meetup in the UK and is the architect of bespoke software solutions used in global sectors (including retail, oil/gas, tourism, education and IT).

John’s fortunate to have picked up a couple of awards throughout his career, including one from the British Computer Society (BCS). Passionate about AI and his craft, John is dedicated to mentoring, collaborating and helping people to learn and navigate the field of AI and emerging technology.