2024 Computer Science Colloquium Series

What is wrong with Artificial intelligence?

Manel Martínez-Ramón, UNM

Wednesday, March 6, 2024, 2:00 PM

Location: Larrañaga Engineering Auditorium (Centennial 1041)

Abstract:

The public opinion about AI bounces between the utopia, with the promise that AI will promote unseen productivity, and the dystopia, where society will collapse and fail. This last one raises fear, controversy, and lack of social acceptance. This makes it necessary to rebrand AI in an unapologetic way, to demonstrate its benefits to society through its incorporation as an engineering tool. There is a quest to construct a corpus of AI fundamentals, AI engineering and industrial and societal applications. In this talk we will review the present context of AI, its outstanding drawbacks from the societal point of view and avenues for a more optimistic future.

Bio:

Dr. Manel Martínez-Ramón is a Professor in the ECE Department. He holds the King Felipe VI Endowed Chair, sponsored by the household of the King of Spain. He received a M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering with a major in Electronics from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain) in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Telecommunications Technologies from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Madrid, Spain) in 1999. He joined the UNM ECE Department in 2013 as a full professor. His research activities include applications of machine learning to smart antennas, smart grid, photovoltaics, particle accelerators, and others. He is co-author of several books. Among them Digital Signal Processing with Kernels (IEEE Press/Wiley, 2018), Machine Learning Applications in Electromagnetics and Antenna Array Processing (Artech House, 2021) and Deep Learning: a practical approach (Wiley, 2024) are the most recent ones.


A little light reading: changes in lighting technology and the human and environmental health

Tom Igoe, Arts Professor, NYU

Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 2:00 PM

Location: Larrañaga Engineering Auditorium (Centennial 1041)

Abstract:

The lighting industry has seen some significant changes in the past decade. There are four driving forces behind this:

  • LEDs are the primary lighting technology now;
  • Digital control of light is becoming increasingly common;
  • Recent discoveries in biology have detailed light's impact on human health;
  • The lighting industry has a material impact on the environment.

These factors change profoundly how we design, how we teach lighting design, how we make lighting fixtures. The first two affect what we can do with light; the second two affect what we should do with light. In this talk, I'll discuss these factors in context of the lighting industry and its intersection with digital systems and human and environmental health.

Bio:

Tom Igoe is the area head for physical computing courses at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts. In these courses, he teaches programming and electronics as tools for art and design, starting with how to sense and respond to human physical expression. His research interests also include networks, lighting design, the environmental and social impacts of technology development, clocks, and monkeys. He is a co-founder of Arduino, and hopes to visit Svalbard and Antarctica someday.