On May 10th of 2015, a group of world experts in Artificial Intelligence gathered at one of the most prestigious venues for Computer Science Seminars: Schloss Dagstuhl. Located in the scenic countryside of Saarland, Schloss Dagstuhl plays an important role in bringing diverse groups of researchers together to collaboratively consider and push forward key topics of the day.
[Initiated] by established leaders in their field, representing the different communities invited to the Seminar, preferably from different institutions. Dagstuhl invites on their behalf about 35 to 45 researchers of international standing from academia and industry, among them promising young researchers. Most seminars discuss an established field within computer science. However, Dagstuhl Seminars are also known for establishing new directions by bringing together separate fields or even scientific disciplines.
–“About Schloss Dagstuhl”
The Schloss Dagstuhl seminar
was organized by Alexander Hauptmann (CMU), James Hodson (presently CEO of the AI for Good Foundation), Juanzi Li (Tsinghua University), Nicu Sebe (University of Trento), and Achim Rettinger (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). We focused on bringing together distinct fields from robotics to textual information extraction, geometry and human psychology, in order to understand where the field of Artificial Intelligence and Cognition needed to go next. We wanted to identify the biggest problems of tomorrow, to incentivize the research community to respond to them today.
Of the select group of researchers of international standing, our very own Stefano Pacifico and Michael Witbrock were among the most active, vocal participants (surprise?) for a unified strategy, and taking measurable steps towards important goals. Several of the suggestions made are specifically going to be targeted by the AI for Good Foundation–so watch this space!
