Voices in AI Podcast: A Conversation with Norman Sadeh

We had early AI connects with Carnegie Mellon.

Voices in AI – Episode 90: A Conversation with Norman Sadeh
By Byron Reese

Episode 90 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Norman Sadeh from Carnegie Mellon University about the nature of intelligence and how AI effects our privacy.

Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt:

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm I’m Byron Reese, today my guest is Norman Sadeh. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He’s affiliated with Cylab which is well known for their seminal work in AI planning and scheduling, and he is an authority on computer privacy. Welcome to the show.

Carnegie Mellon has this amazing reputation in the AI world. It’s arguably second to none. There are a few university campuses that seem to really… there’s Toronto and MIT, and in Carnegie Mellon’s case, how did AI become such a central focus?

Norman Sadeh: Well, this is one of the birthplaces of AI, and so the people who founded our computer science department included Herbert Simon and Allen Newell who are viewed as two of the four founders of AI. And so they contributed to the early research in that space. They helped frame many of the problems that people are still working on today, and they helped recruit also many more faculty over the years that have contributed to making Carnegie Mellon as the place that many people refer to as being the number one place in AI here in the US.

Not to say that there are not other many good places out there, but CMU is clearly a place where a lot of the leading research has been conducted over the years, whether you are looking at autonomous vehicles – for instance, I remember when I came here to do my PhD back in 1997, there was research going on autonomous vehicles. Obviously the vehicles were a lot clumsier than they are today, not moving quite as fast, but there’s a very, very long history of AI research, here at Carnegie Mellon. The same is true for language technology, the same is true for robotics, you name it. There are lots and lots of people here who are doing truly amazing things. ..... "