Keynote Speaker at 2015 UKSim

2015 17th UKSim-AMSS International Conference on Modelling and Simulation (UKSim)

Keynote Speaker-3: History of Computing and AI, a Personal Viewpoint

Abstract:

Summary form only given. The label that most people might attach to me is “Computer Scientist”. Ever since secondary school, I have been fascinated by computers, their power and their potential, and I have enjoyed trying to program them to behave with some artificial intelligence. During my long career, I have witnessed first-hand the astonishingly rapid progress of computing hardware technology, from a few room-sized mainframes to the ubiquity of smartphone processors, and the dramatic increases in the scale, complexity, sophistication and availability of software. I have been privileged to work in several of the principal centres of AI research, both academic and commercial, meeting and collaborating with some remarkable people. the research in which I have been involved has included robotics, computer vision, programming languages, expert systems, neural networks and even experimental psychology and neuroscience. In this talk, I present a (personal) view of these developments, primarily focussing on the earlier history of AI and illustrated with some highlights from my own research.