Abstract:
AI was introduced half a century ago, shortly after the first computer ENIAC was invented in late 1940’s. In the past decades, AI has gained its developing momentum, and has been greatly changing the world and our lives. Andrew NG, the former director of the Stanford AI Lab, stated “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.” What has made the AI breakthroughs, what industrial transforms have AI made, what are the current challenges AI is facing, and what are we expecting in the new decade? Autonomous Driving is one of these areas that AI has been and is transforming – the transportation industry. Since DARPA's pathbreaking Grand Challenge on March 13, 2004, it's been almost two decades. The transformation was acerated in 2012, the year when neural networks were introduced to Deep Learning. Since then, many companies have launched many projects, such as Google and the Waymo project, Uber and the Aurora project, and the ambitious projects of the trillion-dollar companies such as Apple, Tesla, and many others. What are the challenges these pilot programs are facing? When will autonomous-driving cars go mass production and running on the roads? In his seminar on September 30, Dr. Song will brief the history of AI and Autonomous driving, and the challenges we are facing in the areas. The purpose of the seminar is to introduce the concept of AI and auto-driving, to extend our knowledge and to develop our interests, to inspire questions and to explore possibilities.

Biography:
Dr. Logan Song is the Enterprise Cloud Director and Chief Cloud Architect at Dito LLC, a Google Partner Company. With 25+ years of professional experience, Dr. Song is highly skilled in Enterprise Information Technology architecture, specializing in Cloud Computing and Machine Learning. Dr. Song has led numerous datacenter virtualization and cloud projects in Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. He is a Google cloud certified Professional Solution Architect and Machine Learning engineer, and an Amazon (AWS) certified Professional Solution Architect and Machine Learning specialist. Dr. Song holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering, an MS in Computer Science, and a BS in Electrical Engineering.  Currently he is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, teaching graduate Cloud-Computing and Machine-Learning courses. Dr. Song has published many journal articles and whitepapers, and his book “Journey to become a Google Cloud Machine Learning Engineer” is being published this month.Dr. Song is a community volunteer and public speaker. He is a section leader of Stanford University’s “Code in Place” program, a co-founder and first president of the DFW Chinese IT Association, a BOD member of the DFW Professional Association and the DFW Tsinghua Alumni Association. Dr. Song has made numerous speeches in various conferences in Cloud computing, Bigdata and Machine learning. Next month, he will speak at the flagship event of Google Cloud - Google NEXT2022.