Talk WHAT: Push Singh "Giving Computers Common Sense: Reasoning about People and Everyday Life" WHEN: Wednesday, June 29, 2005, 4:00PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) SUMMARY: Computing devices have become indispensable to modern life, but they remain largely ignorant about the people they serve and the world they have so deeply permeated. In this talk Singh will describe his efforts to give computers "common sense"—the ability to think about the world in ways that people do. Singh has been pursuing a project at the Media Lab, in collaboration with many students, staff, and faculty, to develop a suite of commonsense knowledge bases, inference engines, and the architectural elements that link them together, as well as building new kinds of applications for these technologies. Singh believes that by giving machines common sense, they will be able to better help us understand the world and ourselves, help us relate to machines and to each other, help us cope with our many problems, and help us become who we want to become both as individuals and as a society. One of his goals is to develop more realistic and useful models the human mind. A longer-term goal is to help guide us into a future in which artificial minds join us as members of our civilization. BIO: Push Singh is a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab. His research is focused on finding ways to give computers human-like common sense. He is presently working on architectures for commonsense thinking that make use of many types of mechanisms for reasoning, representation, and reflection. He started the Open Mind Common Sense project, an effort to build large-scale commonsense knowledge bases by turning to the general public. Singh received his BS, MEng, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index