—By Xin Wang
On April 21st, 2023, DFWCIA hosted an online seminar: Artificial Intelligence from Past to the Future with Dr. Fei Huang. Dr. Huang is a renowned expert in the field of AI, and a senior director and principal research scientist from Alibaba Damo Academy. Our event chair and Director of Education Zhiguang Huang introduced our organization and Dr. Huang at the beginning of the seminar.
Dr. Huang first introduced what is AI, then the history of AI. AI started from 1950 with the Turning Test, the the Term AI, Eliza, AI Winter, Deep Blue, Watson, Alexa, AlphaGo etc. Then Dr. Huang introduced the current of AI and the future of AI. What impressed the audience the most is the example of Lijun Deng talking to current people in real time video call. The technologies include speech recognition, Speech Synthesis (Text-to-Speech TTS), Natural language processing(NLP), image processing, computer vision etc. Then Dr. Huang illustrated these concepts with textual and audio examples. A few interesting examples include Facebook multi-language translation, AI call to make a salon haircut from Google IO demo. A lot of other AI techniques include Text-to-Image Generation and robotics and computer vision. Besides the cutting-edge technology introduction, Dr. Huang also introduced the concepts of machine learning, deep learning etc. The future of AI is very exciting with the emerging of BART, T5, GPT-4, and large data with large parameters so far has indefinitely improving all AI frameworks that we see. Dr. Huang gave a lot of impressive data, image and video illustrations.
The audience really enjoyed the presentation, and asked a lot of questions to Dr. Huang such as how to evaluate the differences of Bard, chatgpt and other AI models? What challenges are faced when training Chinese models? What do you think of Sam from Meta? Is there a bottle neck to the model size for performance improvement? Any connection between AI, LLM and neuroscience? etc. Dr. Huang answered each and every question with clear specifications and details and the audience learned a lot from the Q&A session itself. The seminar lasted for almost 2 hours and was filled with tons of information and knowledge, and it was a great learning experience with Dr. Huang. Thank you everyone for joining us and we look forward to seeing you in our future events!