Demystifying artificial intelligence
Michalis Bletsas will talk about the myths and truths that accompany AI, about the expectations and fears we project onto it, and about the real role it plays and will play in our lives from now on. He believes that we should see artificial intelligence as an adjunct, as a helper. AI can accelerate science, but not replace it and make decisions for it.
He was born in Chania. He studied electrical engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He then left for a master's degree in Biomedicine in the USA. At the age of 29, he became Director of Computer Science at the Media Lab, a research laboratory owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
He was one of the founding members of One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit company that designed and built a very low-cost laptop – a technology that aimed to help educate children in the world.
During his tenure at OLPC, he contributed to the industrial design, electronics and software of OLPC's XO-1 laptop.
Before joining the Media Lab, he was a systems engineer at Aware, Inc., where he designed and wrote high-performance software libraries for parallel Intel distributed memory supercomputers, and was involved in the application of ADSL technology to provide internet access to home users.
He has extensive consulting activity on technology and technology policy issues. He was a co-founder of two companies and a member of the Board of Directors or consultant in many others.
He recently accepted the position of Governor of the National Cybersecurity Authority at the Ministry of Digital Governance.
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When the MIT Media Lab first opened its doors in 1985, it combined a vision of a digital future with a new style of creative invention. It brought together researchers from far-ranging fields who were passionate about creative expression and design, with pioneers in the emerging field of digital technology. In its first decade (1985–1995), the Lab developed and demonstrated a wide range of ideas for how emerging technologies might transform learning, entertainment, and self-expression. Many facets of the digital revolution can be traced back to ideas from the Media Lab.
The second decade (1995–2005) saw the addition and integration of pervasive, ubiquitous computing. Lab researchers pioneered fields such as wearable computing, sensor networks, tangible media, and affective computing—further enhancing our ability to express ourselves and interact in a more human way with our technology.
The third decade (2005–2015) layered in biological sciences and technologies. Lab researchers have been at the forefront of bringing the human-machine interface onto and into the body; innovating new materials and methods for fabrication; and exploring new tools and technologies for health and wellbeing.
As technology has advanced and become more ubiquitous, the Lab’s ethos and focus have shifted to become more concerned with the ethics, inclusivity, sustainability, and justice of technology’s impact on humanity and on the world. Now in its fourth decade, the Media Lab is focusing on solving for the unprecedented technological, social, and global challenges at the level of systems—designing for human networks; for cities; for the arts; for the brain and body.
