"Earlier, we asked CS students to get Turing award; now Nobel prize" | Prof. Balaraman Ravindran

[00:02:21] Popular subject: The journey of AI and ML to what it is today

[00:08:58] Reinforcement Learning and Machine Learning: A mini introduction class

[00:12:02] Student to AI Pioneer: What sparked off this journey?

[00:15:50] Multi-armed Bandits: A mini masterclass on the name and other terms

[00:19:10] What makes RL hard: the exploration vs exploitation dilemma

[00:23:40] AI now: Is it replacing computer science?

[00:26:20] IIT Madras’ newest department: The Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI

[00:35:19] Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI: An initiative from Bosch

[00:39:06] Centre for Responsible AI: Use AI responsibly or is it much more?

[00:42:15] Interdisciplinary Nature of Academics: How to choose a discipline to study?

[00:46:48] Nobel for AI: How traditional research combined with AI won a Nobel?

[00:52:16] Perplexity: What was the founder as a student?

[00:54:54] Faculty advisor at CFI: First faculty member to be designated advisor

[01:03:05] Early years of Prof Balaraman: Student life and blogging about food and music

[01:09:58] A new kind of Kinship: Evolving relationship between humans and AI

[01:21:30] AI to AGI: Artificial General Intelligence is a misnomer

[01:23:45] B.Tech in AIDA: Putting together the curriculum for the AI and Data Analytics course

[00:02:23] IIT Madras  

[00:26:02] The Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI is the latest department in IIT Madras of which Professor Balaraman is the head.

[00:37:14] IBSE is another Research Lab which looks at AI applied to Biological Systems like microbiome, drugs and disease

[00:38:34] IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi came to IIT Madras for guidance to set up their interdisciplinary AI centres

[00:39:12] Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) was started to ensure responsible use of AI so that it would not lead to adverse situations when used in situations without full understanding of AI capability.

[00:54:56] CFI Centre for Innovation - A maker space that has multiple clubs or special interest groups focused on building and innovating in their areas of interest

[00:12:43] Garry Kasparov who is famous for playing chess with a computer as his opponent.

[00:12:59] Prof Balaraman mentions how Chess was more popular in Tamil Nadu because of  Viswanathan Anand playing the game

[00:27:27] [00:59:13] Professor Bhaskar Ramamurthi was director of IIT after Professor Ananth.  

[00:29:53] Sunil Wadhwani, a distinguished IIT Madras alumnus who donated 110 crores to support the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI

[00:48:07] Herbert A. Simon was one of the founding fathers of AI, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics

[00:48:26] John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, pioneers in neural networks and machine learning, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.

[00:48:28] Professor Subbarao Kambhampati - Distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras who joked about telling computer science students they now need to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize

[00:49:24] David Baker, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on computational protein design 

[00:54:24] Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, called Perplexity and its founder his favourite partners

[00:58:23] Professor M.S Ananth was the director of IIT when CFI was started. 

[00:59:26] Professor Veezhinathan Kamakoti was also one of the directors of IIT Madras who encouraged interdisciplinary clubs and activities

[01:01:17] Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala runs the Research Park in IIT Madras

[01:04:29] Prof Balaraman hosted the TFM (Tamil Film Music) page along with a few other fans of Ilayaraja

[01:07:40] The word Hub was coined by Arthur C Clarke

[01:08:40] Hemant Trivedi started his cooking blog from The Forum Hub created by Prof Balaraman

[01:25:20] Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity chose Electrical Engineering as his discipline of study before doing a Ph.D in Computer Science

[00:35:20] Bosch came forward to fund the Robert Bosch centre for Data Science and AI 

[00:49:40] Google Deep Mind shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with David Baker with their program called Alpha Fold

[00:52:57] One of the co-founders of Perplexity was Professor Balaraman’s student.

[00:54:05] The founder of Perplexity first built a product to search through tweets on Twitter

[01:07:40] Arthur C Clarke wrote the Rama series of books about a massive alien spaceship with human passengers

[00:02:28] Reinforcement Learning - Learning paradigm where feedback is sparse and based on evaluating outputs rather than providing correct answers

[00:13:29] Neural network is a method in artificial intelligence (AI) that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by the human brain.

[00:15:54] Multi-Arm Bandits - Statistical problem setting where one must decide between multiple options with uncertain payoffs

[00:19:11] Exploration vs. Exploitation Dilemma - Core challenge in reinforcement learning about when to switch from trying new options to leveraging known good options

[00:23:32] AI as the New CS - The concept that AI is evolving as a distinct discipline separate from computer science, similar to how CS evolved from electrical engineering

[00:34:36] Network Science/Network Analytics - Studying and applying AI to connected data points rather than individual inputs

[00:37:55] AI COE (Centre Of Excellence) in Healthcare is going to be launched soon.

[00:47:35] Turing Award was the goal for CS students earlier and now it has become the Nobel Prize.

[01:02:21] IIT Madras has founded a campus in Zanzibar