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food tech 2018 | Austin Forum
April 12, 2023

How Close/Far Are We from “Her” - Movie + AI Panel
7:00 p.m. CDT | In-Person
REGISTER
Location
In-Person
Violet Crown Cinema
434 West 2nd Street
Austin, TX 78701
Agenda
​7:00 - 9:45 p.m. | Showing and Discussion
Panelists
​Eunsol Choi, Assistant Professor, University of Texas - Department of Computer Science; Numa Dhamani, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, KUNGFU.AI; Saurabh Jha, Director of Data Science, Dell Technologies
Event Summary
The 2013 movie “Her” is a wonderful science fiction movie about AI having evolved to the point of general intelligence, even sentience. There are no robotics in this AI movie—it is all about the powerful but human-like AI capabilities of his “OS.” “Her” is inspiring and thought-provoking but represents a realistically still far away or possibly unattainable. And yet, on November 30, 2022—just 9 years after “Her”—ChatGPT emerged and suddenly everyone was talking about how it mimics conversation, can be trained on more data than any human could ever learn, etc. (Read our short interview with ChatGPT and you’ll see.) Coupled with AI technologies for turning text to voice and vice versa, one could imagine a verbal form of ChatGPT—and being to wonder if “Her” is much closer than we thought!

Join us for a showing of “Her" followed by a Q&A session with AI experts, including natural language processing (NLP). They will answer your questions and will share their perspectives on the state and future of NLP and the possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and sentience. The movie is still thought-provoking, and our panel will help us understand where we are with AI, where AI is headed, and how we might(?) get to “Her” capabilities.
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Registration and Attendance Instructions
All participants must register for this event via Eventbrite.

​This will be an in-person event at Violet Crown Cinema located at 434 W 2nd St, Austin, TX 78701. While typically Austin Forum events are free, we are charging an $11 registration fee to help us offset facilities costs. We appreciate your understanding and look forward to having you join us for this screening!

About the Panelists

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Eunsol Choi
Assistant Professor
University of Texas - Department of Computer Science
Eunsol Choi is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research area spans natural language processing and machine learning. She is particularly interested in interpreting and reasoning about text in a rich real world context. She received a Ph.D. from University of Washington and B.A from Cornell University. She is a recipient of Facebook research fellowship, Google faculty research award, and outstanding paper award at EMNLP 2021. Prior to UT, she was a visiting researcher at Google AI NY. 
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​Numa Dhamani
Principal Machine Learning Engineer
​KUNGFU.AI
Numa Dhamani is a natural language processing expert with domain expertise in information warfare, security/privacy, and trust and safety. She has advised startups and nonprofits, served as the Principal Investigator on various DARPA programs, and contributed to multiple international peer-reviewed journals. Currently, Numa is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at KUNGFU.AI. She has previously worked on mitigating abuses in the online ecosystem at Twitter, on counter disinformation efforts at the Global Disinformation Index, on detecting online extremism and influence operations at Yonder, and on developing cutting-edge machine learning solutions at Accenture's Innovation Hub. Numa holds degrees in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Saurabh Jha
Director of Data Science
Dell Technologies
Saurabh Jha is an accomplished Director of Data Science with over 15.5 years of experience in Industry across data engineering, data visualization, Information Architecture, advanced analytics and building machine learning systems.

​He has strong background in machine learning with strong focus towards development of deep learning algorithms and is skilled in Computer Vision and NLP automating data driven decision making. He has a proven track record of leading successful complex transformation programs that drive Innovation at scale. As a Director of Data Science at Dell – Customer and Financial Services group he has built and grown the team ground up and leads the business unit with over 26+ talented data scientists, data engineers providing them with strategic direction and guidance to ensure team is equipped with the necessary tools and resources to succeed. In his current role he is responsible to drive operational efficiency and improve customer experience in Order to Cash, Customer Care, Disbursements and CFO Org by developing and integrating Intelligence as a Service into their operational business systems.
 
He is also Executive in Residence at UT, Austin and collaborates with University Professors and Students to drive joint Research. He has filed several patents in US Patent office and also has a paper published at NeurIps 2022.

PARTNERS

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