Prof B. Yegnanarayana

Abstract: This talk is to recall the vision of John McCarthy and others, when they coined the term AI in 1956, and to contrast it with how AI is understood now. Here, the term I-Chip to refer to the biological neural network (BNN), and the term AI-Chip to refer to the current models of computing. Some salient features of the architectures of these chips at the functional level are considered for contrasting the tasks that these models can perform. The best way to understand their functionality is by comparing the pattern processing ability of the I-Chip vs the data processing ability of the AI-Chip. The speaker will discuss the features like memory, learning, and recall, to appreciate the meaning of the term intelligence used in the tasks involving these models. I will give a brief overview of the evolution of AI over the past 7 decades, leading to the current thrust on deep learning models, to highlight the mismatch between these two architectures. The mismatch indicates the widening gap in our quest for realizing natural intelligence through artificial means. Several real-world examples will be discussed to justify this conclusion

Biography:

About the Speaker: Prof. Bayya Yegnanarayana is currently Emeritus Professor and INSA Honorary Scientist at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H). He was Professor Emeritus at BITS-Pilani Hyderabad Campus during 2016. He was an Institute Professor from 2012 to 2016, Professor & Microsoft Chair from 2006 to 2012 at IIIT-H. He was Professor (1980 to 2006) and Head of the CSE Dept (1985 to 1989) at IIT Madras. Visiting Associate Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA (1977 to 1980), and a member of the faculty at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore (1966 to 1978). He received BSc from Andhra University Visakhapatnam in 1961, and BE, ME and PhD from IISc Bangalore in 1964, 1966, and 1974, respectively. His research interests are in signal processing, speech, image processing and neural networks.

He has published over 420 papers in these areas. He is the author of the book “Artificial Neural Networks “ published by PrenticeHall of India in 1999. He has supervised 39 PhD and 42 MS theses at IISc, IITM and IIIT-H. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc), a Fellow of the IEEE (USA) and a Fellow of the International Speech Communications Association (ISCA). He was the recipient of the 3 IETE Prof. S.V.C. Aiya Memorial Award in 1996. He received the Prof. S.N.Mitra Memorial Award for the year 2006 from INAE. He was awarded the 2013 Distinguished Alumnus Award from IISc Bangalore, and The Sayed Husain Zaheer Medal (2014) of INSA. He was awarded Prof. Rais Ahmed Memorial Lecture Award from the Acoustical Society of India in 2016, and Life Fellow of IIT Kharagpur in 2022. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing during 2003-2006. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He received Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Anantapur in February 2019. He was the General Chair for Interspeech2018 held in Hyderabad, India, during September 2018. He was a visiting Professor at IIT Dharwad and at CMU Africa in Rwanda during 2019. Currently, he is also an Adjunct Faculty at IIT Tirupati.

Address:Hyderabad, India