A New Direction with Prof John Kelleher

The pace of change in AI is beyond rapid and it's an exciting time for research in Ireland. Professor John Keller is now leading the way in research as the new director of ADAPT, the SFI Research Center for AI Driven Digital Content Technology. Today we hear about John’s ambitions in his new appointment including his thoughts on current developments in AI, how he plans to lead ADAPT and prepare for the future and why supporting multidisciplinary research will be a key focus for the centre. THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT ● Keeping up with the pace of AI as it enters the mainstream ● SignON: Making AI accessible ● ADAPT’s role in mitigating the harms of AI ● Integrating multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research ● Mentoring and resourcing new researchers and culture ● Preparing for future challenges across different industries GUEST DETAILS Prof John D. Kelleher is the newly appointed director of the ADAPT Centre and Chair of Artificial Intelligence at Trinity College, Dublin. John’s core research expertise is in the areas machine/deep learning and natural language processing. Previously, he was the TU Dublin lead in the ADAPT centre and the scientific lead for the Digital Content Transformation Strand. Within the ADAPT Centre he leads research projects on language modelling, lexical semantics, machine translation, novelty detection, image captioning, dialog systems, and making AI more environmentally sustainable. John has been the academic lead on numerous industry projects across a range of topics and domains, including: anomaly detection, transfer learning, customer segmentation and propensity modelling, dialog systems and chat bots, and information retrieval and natural language processing. MORE INFORMATION Adapt Radio is produced by DustPod.io for the Adapt Centre For more information about ADAPT visit www.adaptcentre.ie/ QUOTES The impact and penetration of AI into people's lives means that there's so much interest from industry in artificial intelligence, and that's really driving the pace. - John Kelleher When these types of technologies are prevalent throughout society it's important that the people in that society understand what they are and how they work. - John Kelleher The most important aspect, or the foundations we need to build in order for interdisciplinary research to flourish, is that we can communicate across disciplines. So we need to spend time with each other as researchers, understanding each other's language. And at the core of that is a willingness to listen. - John Kelleher Exciting things often happen at the margins, between disciplines, for people to come together in a complementary team, where they have complementary expertise. And so once you can build a bridge across the discipline, then you can do really exciting work. - John Kelleher Fluency in and of itself isn't the sign of intelligence that we thought it was before. And that's why maybe we need more emphasis on creativity and critical thinking within education. - John Kelleher KEYWORDS #ai #adapt #research #technology #artificialintelligence #culture #languagemodels #accessibility