Dr Jin-ping Han and Prof Rolf Mueller gave a talk titled “From Academia to Industry: Interdisciplinary AI Research” at the School of Digital Science (SDS), Universiti Brunei Darussalam on 10 January 2024, Wednesday.
The talk was first started Prof Mueller, covering the academic context, looking at achieving greater levels of autonomy and how we can further allow for autonomy in machines through bio-inspired AI analytics in studying bats.
Dr Han continued the second part, touching on the industry context by sharing a few use-cases of interdisciplinary AI research such as a patent on media capture device with encryption features for partitioned neural network; a big AI research agenda at IBM on watsonx and its uniqueness with an ongoing topic on how AI may address climate change.
The talk was attended by stakeholders from government-linked companies, research students and faculty members.
Talk Abstract
Interdisciplinarity has been gaining popularity in both curiosity-driven academia and commercial purpose-targeted industry because of the explosion of innovation opportunities appearing at boundary crossing and integration of different kinds of knowledge, esp. in the areas of interdisciplinary AI Research. A few use cases will be shared by a university professor and an industrial principal scientist in the tutorial talk.
In an academic context, the ongoing AI revolution will enable scientists to find patterns in data that have more dimensions and in general higher complexity than was previously possible. This increased capability could help linking areas of science with great complexity, especially the life sciences, to areas such as engineering, where a definitive understanding of the used mechanisms is required. Merging AI with digitization of biological function and computational predictions of the physical effects associated with these functions could lead to a much deeper understanding of how biological evolution has solved complex problems and adopted common principles for different solutions. Such an understanding could then turn the world's biodiversity into a natural resource for bioinspired engineering. As a case study, bat-inspired robotic sensing and flight based on AI data analytics for applications requiring autonomy in complex natural environments will be discussed.
From industry point of view, a few use-case examples of interdisciplinary AI research from small to big will be shared, such as a patent-based case on media capture device with encryption features for partitioned neural network; a big AI research agenda at IBM on watsonx and its uniqueness with an ongoing topic on how AI may address climate change. In addition, a new category of interdisciplinary AI application for wellbeing and social systems from state-of-the-art will be touched upon too.
Speakers’ Short Bio
Rolf Mueller has studied bat biosonar from the perspectives of biophysics and bioinspired engineering for over 20 years. He received his degrees from the University of Tuebingen in Germany and was a postdoc at Yale University, and has held faculty positions in Germany, Denmark, China, and the USA. He currently serves as the Lynn professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. His work on bat biosonar and its engineering replications has been published in some of the best journals in the relevant fields such Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physics Review Letters, Nature Machine Learning, and the Journal of Experimental Biology. He has been a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America since 2019.
Jin-Ping Han received her PhD degree in electrical engineering from Yale University in 2002. After a postdoc at NIST, she switched to industry in 2004. Currently she is principal research scientist and master inventor at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, leading projects on AI hardware, chiplet design and technology, as well as semiconductor clients. Prior to the ongoing ones, she has also been working on bio-inspired computing and generations of advanced semiconductor technology development. She has more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and over 110 patents. She has received various awards including Women of Color STEM Outstanding Achievement Award (USA) and IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.
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