Revolutions

UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING
October 2–3, 2012
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Conference schedule
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venue
The Westin Convention Center,
Pittsburgh
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for Hotel information

conference overview
At this conference, we'll explore the central question of what we mean by understanding and how we can impart intelligence and competence to computers and computing. We'll delve into different types of understanding and look at notions of smart, what underlies intelligence and understanding, and how organizational decisions could be made.

Early computer apps exploited computers as numeric processors of data, yet some pioneers foresaw symbolic computer models at the knowledge and wisdom ends of the understanding spectrum. Organizations expect and depend on computing and its associated technologies to be productive somewhere along the understanding continuum.

We'll explore the nature of data, knowledge, and wisdom, and examine the interplay and interdependencies between them. When no specific understanding of a new situation exists, do brains and computers learn differently? Is human understanding increasingly (co-)dependent on how computers and machines understand? We may find that unintelligent agents are more efficacious for some tasks than intelligent ones.

Is there a point at which we (or systems) have sufficient understanding to make a decision? How are sensing technologies changing paradigms for AI, for example? What would it mean to have "unintelligent" agents? We often perceive things incorrectly, but still get workable answers and solutions; can we quantify the breadth, depth, and veracity of understanding?

How will our lives be affected when robots begin to understand and make assumptions about the world around them? Will their understanding of sensory data be different from ours? The rise of social media and of computing as an interactive, participatory experience (with people and with other machines) changes the playing field for understanding. The brittleness of today's traditional "smart" engines will be tested as they begin to handle tomorrow's very large, complex problems, especially when humans are not in the loop. As technologies increase their level of understanding, do they increase our ability to predict the future?

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