Horvitz will share directions and results enabled by the confluence of large-scale data resources, jumps in computational power and advances in machine intelligence. He will focus on efforts that leverage learning and inference to help people with decisions, covering work in transportation, medicine, public health, and interactive systems. He will present projects that draw from traditional sources of data, such as GPS signals and electronic health records, as well as efforts that harness more exotic streams of information, including the use of planes in flight and anonymized behavioral data drawn from web services. He will conclude by discussing the promise of leveraging data, learning, and reasoning to enable new kinds of collaboration between people and machines to address challenges in the sciences, society, and daily life.
Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow and director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond. He has pursued principles and applications of artificial intelligence, with contributions in decisions under uncertainty, machine learning, bounded rationality, information retrieval and human computation. His research and collaborations have led to fielded systems in healthcare, transportation, human-computer interaction, ecommerce, robotics, and aerospace. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Association for Computing Machinery. He received the Feigenbaum Prize and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for his research contributions. He has served as president of the AAAI, chair of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communications, and on advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, DARPA, and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. More information can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz.