[APPLAUSE]
Good morning.
I'm Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of engineering at MIT.
Thank you for joining us today as we
begin a remarkable exploration.
We're here to launch the MIT Intelligence
Quest, an institute-wide effort to answer the deepest
questions about human and machine intelligence, MIT's AI
Moonshots.
Today you will be hearing from our amazing researchers
and I would like to offer just a little context
to frame the program.
I want to quickly tell you three things about the MIT
Intelligence Quest.
First of all, it's uniting.
When MIT President Rafael Reif talked to me
about the idea in the fall of 2017,
I felt an immediate sense of excitement.
He wanted us to build an ambitious--
make that an extremely ambitious initiative that advances AI
and that uses AI to advance all disciplines
dealing with big data.
I immediately knew this effort would become
profoundly important for MIT.
This excitement is echoed and shared
by the four other deans at MIT, Mike Sipser, Melissa Nobles,
David Schmittlein, and Hashim Sarkis.
And it is the same enthusiasm that inspired the more than 200
faculty and staff who contributed to making
this launch a reality.
People feel united by the MIT Intelligence Quest.
Its mission reflects our values.
It embodies MIT's commitment to the pursuit
of hard problems on the horizon, to doing fundamental research,
to making unexpected breakthroughs,
to paying attention to the real world
implications of our creations.
Second, the MIT intelligence quest
is ready to make societal impact.
We have more than 200 investigators working directly
on intelligence-related research areas.
Student interest is tremendous.
Our undergraduate and graduate classes in AI
are oversubscribed.
We have industry allies who share our passion for tackling
big, real world problems.
Chief among them is IBM.
And you'll hear more today on the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
We're in ongoing discussions to engage companies
from many industries in the MIT Intelligence Quest.
And we have an entrepreneurial ecosystem that is unparalleled
and that is ready to deliver the ideas emerging from the MIT
Intelligence Quest to the world.
The third thing, we're poised to deliver.
The MIT Intelligence Quest will thrive in our culture
of compulsive curiosity.
It will thrive because when MIT people have their teeth
in an interesting problem, they instinctively reach out
across disciplines to solve it.
It will thrive because we can offer it
a continuous flow of fresh minds and fresh thinking.
And it will thrive because our passion
for innovation and for making a better world is unparalleled.
I would like to offer special thanks to Daniela Rus,
Jim DiCarlo, Josh Tenenbaum, Tommy Poggio, Eric Grimson,
Joi Ito, Munther Dahleh, Dmitris Bertsimas,
Karen Gleason, Krystyn Van Vliet,
and Maria Zuber for their invaluable contributions.
I would also like to express our thanks to Xiao'ou
Tang for his vision and support and to acknowledge
the special contributions of Eric Schmidt and David Siegel,
the founding advisors to the MIT Intelligence Quest
advisory board, who has been instrumental
from the very start.
We would not be here without their advice and inspiration.
I invite everyone to join us in what is to come.
Our remarkable speakers today will
delve into the interlocking realms
of artificial intelligence, cognitive science,
neuroscience, social sciences, and ethics.
They will apply expertise from the worlds of health, robotics,
biology, finance, economics, and many more.
As you will hear in much greater detail throughout the day,
particularly during our thematically-linked morning
sessions, MIT is poised to lead this ambitious effort
through two linked entities, The Core
and The Bridge within the MIT Intelligence Quest.
The Core will advance the science and engineering
of both human and machine intelligence.
The Bridge will be dedicated to the application of MIT
discoveries in natural and artificial intelligence
to all disciplines and it will host
state of the art tools from industry and research labs
worldwide.
I strongly encourage you to finish the day with the poster
session at the Media Lab where you
will come to see our very best work
in the fields of human and machine intelligence
and its applications.
I would like to thank Thomas Tull and Tulco for sponsoring
the poster session.
The MIT Intelligence Quest emerges
at a moment of great importance in the development
of artificial intelligence.
This is a time for imagining possibilities.
Imagine preventing deaths from cancer
by using deep learning for early detection and personalized
treatment.
Imagine artificial intelligence in sync with, complementing,
and assisting our own intelligence.
Imagine every scientist and engineer having access
to human intelligence-inspired algorithms that
open new avenues of discovery in their fields.
Again, we're delighted to have you
here as we launch this quest to unlock
the nature of intelligence and harness
it to make a better world.
It is now my pleasure to welcome someone whose partnership I've
counted on throughout the development of this initiative,
MIT Provost Marty Schmidt.
[APPLAUSE]