Sebastian Riedel wins major AI award

Senior Lecturer, Dr Sebastian Riedel, has won a major AI award.

The Paul G. Allen Foundation announced last Wednesday that it has awarded $5.7 million in grants to five projects that aim to teach machines to understand what they see and read, including anything from a photograph to a chart, a diagram to an entire textbook.

Sebastian's work will investigate an approach where machines convert symbolic knowledge, read from text and other sources, into vector form, and then approximate the behavior of logic through algebraic operations. Ultimately, this approach will enable machines to pass high-school science exams or perform automatic fact checking.

“The Allen Distinguished Investigator program has become a platform for scientists and researchers to push the boundaries on the conventional and test the limits of how we think about our existence and the world as we know it,” Dune Ives, co-manager of The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, said in a statement. “We are only beginning to grasp how deep intelligence works. We hope these grants serve as a valuable catalyst for one day making artificial intelligence a reality.”