Machine Intelligence and its Role in Strengthening Industry-Academia Collaboration

Abstract

Plenary talk I gave in Robotics and AI Track at the International Conference on Industry Academia Collaboration (IAC2015). Machine intelligence forms the foundation of many successful industries we are witnessing nowadays. These industries include, but are not limited to, robotics, intelligent transportation systems, assistive technologies, speech recognition, machine vision, predictive analytics and maintenance, biometrics, semantic web, network-centric warfare, home intelligence to name but a few.

Machine intelligence is a promising field that can bridge the gap between academia and industry through bringing industry personnel in the classroom/research lab and academic students/researchers in the industrial workplace in an interactive, collaborative and participative relationship replacing the traditional technology donor-recipient relationship. Industry will benefit from this win-win relationship through getting access to the latest, most up-to-date knowledge base and state-of-the-art facilities, creating more opportunities, getting better guidance for the direction of technology development, creating innovative solutions for their industrial problems, increasing productivity and improving the quality and the competitiveness at both local and international levels. Academia will also benefit from this active partnership through educating students/researchers on real-world problems and applied research, getting funds to support the research activities, getting access to real data and spinning off research to companies to create viable products and services.

This interactive, collaborative and participative relationship between industry and academia in the area of machine intelligence will lead to create innovative intelligent machines/systems able to function and to interact autonomously within unstructured, dynamic and sometimes partially observable environments. These machines/systems, if properly designed and developed, would perceive the environment through artificial eyes, would communicate in natural language, would reason, solve problems and formulate plans, would act on the environment to achieve certain goals, and would learn from their experience.

This talk will take machine intelligence as a vehicle to discuss how to strengthen the industry-academia collaboration. The talk will provide a comprehensive introduction to the key machine intelligence concepts and techniques involved in the development of intelligent machines/systems. The talk will also review the exponential growth of machine intelligence and its promising applications in a number of pertinent areas of industrial and commercial importance. The applicability of these emerging technologies in developing economies will also be addressed. The role of machine intelligence in strengthening the industry-academia collaboration will be discussed and some success stories will be described.