Good morning.
My name is Eric Grimson.
I have the privilege of serving as MIT'S Chancellor
for Academic Advancement, as well
as holding the Bernard M Gordon Chair of Medical Engineering.
And I'm delighted to be the chair
and moderator for this session of our great event.
In the last session, we heard a really interesting discussion
of the future foundations of intelligence science
and intelligence engineering involving new insights
into human intelligence and new methods
to allow machines to learn effectively, hopefully,
like a young child.
But the corps will do more than just explore intelligence.
It will also provide a substrate on which
to build applications and tools that
will enable machine learning and other intelligent methods
to be utilized broadly.
We're already seeing that impact in many areas
of our daily life.
And that's going to accelerate over the coming years.
Thus, another key goal of MIT'S intelligence quest
is to ensure that these discoveries have a clear path
to impacting the world.
We call that the bridge.
For those of you who know little bit of MIT history,
think of that bridge as project Athena 2.0.
Project Athena brought computing resources
to every student and faculty member on campus.
The bridge, we hope, will do the same for intelligence.
It will help us advance diverse fields from synthetic biology,
to economics and finance, from disease
detection to political science, to nuclear fusion.
All of these fields and others are
in the process of being revolutionized
by access to unprecedented computational power and data
sets and by powerful new algorithms that
deliver unprecedented insights.
It's thus my privilege to serve as the chair for the bridge
and to introduce an outstanding group of faculty who
will talk about applying the tools of augmented intelligence
to their disciplines.
We'd like to start by introducing
Jim Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical
Engineering and Science at MIT and a member of the Harvard MIT
Health Sciences and Technology faculty.
He's also a core founding faculty member
of the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired
Engineering at Harvard and an Institute member of the Broad
Institute at MIT and Harvard.
His business card's really long, as you can tell.
And Jim was a recipient of a MacArthur Genius
grant in an earlier day.
His patented technologies had been licensed by over 25
companies and in the late January,
Synlogic, a company that he co-founded with Professor Tim
Lou, announced its first public offering of common stock.
Today, Jim will be speaking about deep
learning for synthetic biology.
He'll be followed by a speaker who
earned her PhD in electrical engineering and computer
science here at MIT.
Cynthia Breazeal is an associate professor
of media arts and sciences where she
founded and directs the personal robots group in the Media Lab.
She's also the founder and chief scientist of Jibo.
Cynthia will be speaking about the social and emotional
intelligence for human AI collaboration.
Our next speaker was also awarded a MacArthur Genius
grant just this last October for her work in developing
machine learning methods that enabled computers to process
and analyze vast amounts of human language data.
Regina Barzilay is the Delta electronics professor
of electrical engineering and computer science
and an investigator at the computer science and Artificial
Intelligence Lab.
She will be speaking about a subject that
is very personal to her, learning to cure cancer.
Dina Katabi, our next speaker, was also
honored with the MacArthur Genius
grant for her research on improving the speed,
reliability, and security of data exchange,
particularly in wireless networks.
The Andrew and Erna Viterbi professor
of electrical engineering and computer science.
Dina is also the director of the networks at MIT research group
and the director of the MIT Center for Wireless
Networks and Mobile Computing.
Dina is also an MIT alumna, earning both a masters and PhD
in computer science.
And she will talk about how machine learning
and wireless technology enable intelligent monitoring
of people, including both physical and mental states.
Following Dina, we will welcome Andrew Lo, the Charles E.
And Susan T. Harris professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Andrew directs the MIT laboratory
for financial engineering.
His research interests are in evolutionary models
of behavior in adaptive markets, systemic risk, hedge fund
industry dynamics, and health care finance.
And he will talk about artificial intelligence
in financial markets.
And our last speaker will be Marin Soljacic, a professor
of physics here at MIT.
Marin's research interests include
AI and electromagnetic phenomena with a focus
on nano-photonics, non-linear optics, and wireless power
transfer.
He earned his bachelor's in physics and EE here at MIT.
And was also honored in 2008 with a MacArthur Genius
grant for demonstrating both theoretically and
experimentally that power can be transmitted wirelessly.
Marin will explore how novel, physical intuitions may
lead to very different hardware platforms that
will support efficient and effective
intelligent processing.
Please join me in welcoming Jim Collins to the stage.