Artificial Intelligence 2.0

Self-driving cars, Amazon Alexa, image search... our life is forever being enriched by “intelligent algorithms”. And the algorithms just keep on getting smarter and smarter: they can understand what we say, find out things about us, pick up foreign languages, learn to paint. That’s the key: they can learn. But take a good look at them and what will we find? And how can an algorithm “learn”, exactly?

Constantinos Daskalakis, a professor at MIT, has accepted an invitation from the Onassis Stegi in the context of the “Hybrids” exhibition to come and speak to us about the ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence, the technology that underlies it, and the philosophical questions these developments are raising for learning and intelligence.

Constantinos Daskalakis is a Professor in MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. He graduated from the National Technical University of Athens in Electrical Engineering, did his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked at Microsoft as a post-doctoral researcher. His research is focused on theoretical computer science and its interface with economics, statistics and artificial intelligence.

The international computer science organization ACM awarded him its Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2008. His thesis on “The Complexity of Nash Equilibria” answers a scientific puzzle which had remained unsolved since John Nash published it in 1950—the work won Nash the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. Daskalakis’ thesis identifies computational obstacles to the implementability of the Nash equilibrium, which has long been at the epicentre of financial mathematics, highlighting the need for new and more realistic equilibrium concepts.

His work won him the Game Theory Society’s Game Theory and Computer Science prize. He has won a number of other awards and distinctions including the Career Award from the US National Science Foundation, the Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the 2011 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Outstanding Paper prize, a Microsoft research scholarship, and the research award from the Vatican’s Giuseppe Sciacca foundation.