Past Events

This is hosted by our colleagues at MIT Technology Review!

For over 25 years, EmTech MIT has been the trusted destination for established senior executives and emerging leaders, researchers, and entrepreneurs to stay ahead of change. Curated by the expert editors of MIT Technology Review, our flagship technology event delivers the clarity and insight you need to navigate uncertainty and lead with conviction.

This year’s program dives into the rapid evolution of AI, alongside transformative breakthrough developments in climate tech, quantum computing, robotics, digital trust, decentralized systems, and more—focusing on the technologies most likely to shape the future.

In an era defined by disruption, EmTech MIT equips you to cut through the noise, identify real opportunities, challenge assumptions, and engage with the people who are building what comes next. Will you shape your future or be shaped by it?

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The CSAIL Forum event series is hosted by Professor Daniela Rus, CSAIL Director. This virtual series was created to inspire conversation, share insights, and shape the future of computer science and artificial intelligence. Registration is required. 
See past forum recordings and learn more here

Please join us for the CSAIL Forum with Alison Gopnik

Speaker: Alison Gopnik Dept. of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Venue: Live stream via Zoom: Registration required
Abstract: Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition, and causal knowledge is central to both intuitive and scientific world models. However, causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for standard Large Models using standard techniques of deep learning. In contrast, cognitive scientists have applied advances in our formal understanding of causation in computer science, particularly within the Causal Bayes Net formalism, to understand human causal learning. These approaches also face challenges when it comes to learning however. In parallel, in the very different tradition of reinforcement learning, researchers have developed the idea of an intrinsic reward signal called “empowerment”. An agent is rewarded for maximizing the mutual information between its actions and their outcomes, regardless of the external reward value of those outcomes. In other words, the agent is rewarded if variation in an action systematically leads to parallel variation in an outcome so that variation in the action predicts variation in the outcome. Empowerment, then has two dimensions , it involves both controllability and variability. The result is an agent that has maximal control over the maximal part of its environment. “Empowerment” may be an important bridge between classical Bayesian causal learning and reinforcement learning and may help to characterize causal learning in humans and enable it in machines.  If an agent learns an accurate causal model of the world they will necessarily increase their empowerment, and, vice versa, increasing empowerment will lead to a more accurate (if implicit) causal model of the world. Empowerment may also explain distinctive empirical features of children’s causal learning, as well as providing a more tractable computational account of how that learning is possible.

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