Congratulations Huguens Jean & Sunil Gandhi!

A hearty congratulations to Huguens Jean  who successfully defended his PhD dissertation topic Paper Form Classification For Information Systems Strengthening in Developing Countries. He is now working for Captricity, where he has the unique opportunity to bring his PhD topic to life in the form a product as proud Senior Engineer.

With him is Sunil Gandhi, who defended his Master’s Thesis. Congratulations Sunil! You guys make us proud. A very happy Dr. Tim Oates seen here too!

A quick shoutout to our friends from our sister labs! Dr. Varish Mulwad (from Ebiquity)& Dr. Sushmita Rao (from Eclipse)who successfully defended their PhD dissertations. A hearty congratulations to you too! Hope you’ll have a fabulous life ahead!

Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

(Article published in Techcrunch on 04/08/2015).

As yet another tech pioneer with no connection to artificial intelligence steps out to voice his fears about AI being catastrophic for the human race, I feel the need respond. While I respect Steve Wozniak’s technological contributions to our culture, I fear that he, like so many others (Musk, Hawking, Gates), is poisoning the well for fear of something he doesn’t truly understand.

Conflating facts of technology’s rapid progress with a Hollywood understanding of intelligent machines is provocative (honestly, it’s a favorite in my most-loved science fiction books and movies), but this technology doesn’t live in a Hollywood movie, it isn’t HAL or Skynet, and it deserves a grounded, rational look.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we have (or can plausibly) create a superhuman AI. Such an AI could, like us, think all kinds of things — “the humans created me and they’re really interesting” or “the humans’ bodily functions are mildly annoying” or “all humans must die!” — all of which are equally speculatively plausible. So why anyone gives the doomsday scenario any more weight than the others is a bit of a mystery to me.

For the full article, read it on Techcrunch.