Kozhikode: Any automation should have manual over-ride, said P J Narayanan, Director, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. The researcher in the areas of Computer Vision, computational cameras, and parallel computing was delivering a talk in UL Cyberpark on “Artificial Intelligence: Reality & Thoughts” jointly organised by Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation, ULCCS and Calicut Management Association.
The professor cited the crashes of two Boeing aircrafts to substantiate his contention. Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS software, which is designed to help prevent the 737 Max from stalling repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down, leaving pilots fighting for control. The tug of war between the craft and crew led to the crashes.
He expanded on the recent surge in AI research and products. The recent progress in several components of AI has indeed been impressive, though there is a wide divergence of views on where AI will lead humanity, ranging from technology replacing jobs and human lives to a dystopian world of 'singularity,' - a moment which inventor-futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts will happen in 2045, when super intelligent machines transform humanity - with technology/AI becoming lord and master. The IIIT-H director also spoke on the need for AI-humanities multi-disciplinary approach, ethics in automation and privacy protocol.
P J Narayanan built the Virtualized Reality system in mid 1990s at the Carnegie Mellon University to capture 3D geometry and appearance of dynamic events. He also was an early adopter of GPUs for several Computer Vision and general computing tasks. He got his bachelors from IIT Kharagpur, masters and PhD from the University of Maryland, all in Computer Science. He was a research faculty member at the Robotics Institute of CMU from 1992 to '96 and headed the Vision and Virtual Reality groups of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bengaluru from 1996 to 2000. He has been with IIIT Hyderabad from 2000 and has been its PG Coordinator, Dean of Research, and, from 2013, its Director.
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