Max Welling (Qualcomm/UvA)

Keynote

Is deep learning going to revolutionize healthcare?

Examples from the machine learning lab

According to the news, AI is going to revolutionize healthcare, prevent millions of traffic accidents, make our lives more efficient and comfortable. But also, AI will take our jobs, manipulate our opinions and maybe even terminate the human race. In this talk I will first define what AI really is. Then discuss the current state of the field and in particular discuss all the things humans can (still) do better than algorithms. Are we even close to what we are made to believe by the popular media? I will end with discussing ethical questions concerning AI. How can we protect our privacy? How would it be to live in a world where algorithms make all the decisions for you? Can we prevent algorithms to discriminate? How can we build trust in AI systems?

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, a university spin-off in deep learning that got acquired by Qualcomm in summer 2017. In the past he held postdoctoral positions at Caltech (1998-2000), UCL (2000-2001) and the U. Toronto (2001-2003). He received his PhD in 1998 under supervision of Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft. 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).