Associate Professor Deshen Moodley, from the Department of Computer Science and Deputy Director of South African National Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, will present the Science Faculty Special Research Seminar.  His talk is entitled, "Artificial Intelligence: the quest towards adaptive and cognitive computer systems". 

Abstract: Next generation computer systems must adapt to complex, dynamic and distributed environments. These systems must deal with interoperability and data fusion; situation detection and prediction; and system and knowledge evolution. These systems will typically draw from and incorporate techniques from different areas of artificial intelligence (AI) including knowledge representation and reasoning, probabilistic graphical models and machine learning. In this talk I will describe some of the broader challenges for creating such systems and the potential for AI techniques to deal with these. This will be illustrated in three different prototype systems, i.e. remote sensing in the Sensor Web, indoor air quality monitoring and management in low cost households, and automatic generation of pollination networks from distributed national history museum data collections.

Bio: Deshen Moodley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town and the Deputy Director and co-founder of the South African National Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR). His broad research interests revolve around large scale cognitive and adaptive architectures, specifically investigating mechanisms to combine logic based software agents with probabilistic and machine learning techniques. Dr Moodley joined UCT in July 2016 after serving 13 years as an academic in the Computer Science department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has also spent some time as a visiting researcher at the Clinical Decision Making Group, CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Machine Vision Unit, University of Edinburgh, and the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster.