General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence: Transforming Business in the Future
The 2016 Annual Hitachi Lectureship at AAAS will be addressed by Dr. Kazuo Yano, Corporate Officer and Corporate Chief Scientist, Director, Hitachi Artificial-Intelligence Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd., and disscussant David Rejeski, Director, Technology, Innovation and the Environment Project, Environmental Law Institute.
Description
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology such as deep learning has attracted significant attention from the mainstream media in recent years. Yet stories of successful business models, moreover, profitable ones, based on AI technology remain scarce. What are the possible missing links between the available technologies and the desirable business outcomes? The lecture will address this question and explore the development of post-deep-learning AI technology as one such link that can drive and impact business outcomes. This general-purpose AI, added-on to general systems, enables the system to learn and grow automatically, which Hitachi has applied to 57 cases in 14 domains. This lecture will further cover real use cases in the fields of finance, industry, retail, logistics and transportation, to examine prospective changes we face in the future of business.
Kazuo Yano - Dr. Kazuo Yano is a Corporate Officer and the Corporate Chief Scientist at Hitachi, Ltd. He is also the Director of the Hitachi Artificial-Intelligence Laboratory.
Yano has been recognized for his innovative work in the semiconductor field, such as developing the world’s first room-temperature single-electron memories in 1993. In 2003, he pioneered the measurement and analysis of social big data, especially with the usage of wearable sensors. The sensor was featured as one of the innovative evolving wearable technologies in the graphic “Wearable Devices: A History” in the Harvard Business Review. Yano has been on the innovative forefront and contributing to this field from times much earlier than when “big data” was coined and became a ubiquitous term. His work on quantifying happiness is used in over 15 companies and widely quoted in the media. His recent work on the first general purpose artificial intelligence, which has been applied to over 57 cases in 14 domains, has attracted interest in a wide variety of businesses. Yano has applied for over 350 patents and his papers are cited by over 2500 papers. His book, An Invisible Hand of Data, is cited as one of the Top 10 Business Books in 2014 in Japan.
Yano received the 1994 IEEE Paul Rappaport Award, 1996 IEEE Lewis Winner Award, 1998 IEEE Jack Raper Award, Hitachi Henjinkai Kujin Award 1995, 2007 MBE Erize Prize, and the Best Paper Award at the ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Informatics in 2012. Yano is an IEEE Fellow, and a member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics, the Physical Society of Japan, the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and the IEICE of Japan. He served on the External Advisory Board of the IEEE Spectrum and served on Technical Program Committees at IEDM, DAC, ASSCC, ASP-DAC, SPOTS and EmNet. He was the Co-Chairman/Chairman of the Symposium on VLSI Circuits in 2008 and 2009. He is an Executive Member of the Hitachi Henjinkai. Yano received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Waseda University, Japan. He was a Visiting Scientist at Arizona State University from 1991 to 1992.
David Rejeski - David Rejeski directs the Technology, Innovation and the Environment Project at the Environmental Law Institute after serving for over a decade as director of the Science, Technology and Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His work focuses on emerging technologies, their impacts and policy implications, in areas such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, additive manufacturing, and IT. Prior to the Wilson Center, he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency (Office of Policy, Planning and Evaluation). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), a guest Researcher at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, a member of EPA’s National Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and Technology, and board member of American University’s Center on Environmental Policy. He has graduate degrees in public administration and environmental design from Harvard and Yale universities.