Inaugural Seminar • AI Institute — Artificial Intelligence — History, Opportunities and Challenges

Monday, September 24, 2018 3:30 pm - 3:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Hamid Tizhoosh, SDE
University of Waterloo

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) contains several ebbs and flows and is marked by many colorful personalities. We review major milestones in the development of machine learning, starting from principal component analysis to deep networks, and point to a multitude of pivotal developments that have strongly contributed to drawing the historical path of AI. 

From audacious promise of designing a GPS, General Problem Solver, to the first major “AI Winter,” and from modest success of artificial neural networks in early 90s to the major shift of paradigm in mid 2000s through deep learning, we attempt to understand how AI has reached its today’s position surrounded by enthusiasm and high expectations. We look at major opportunities that AI has created today, from natural language processing to computer vision applications, as well as reviewing the challenges that the AI community is facing today, from black-box behavior to adversarial attacks.


Bio: Hamid R. Tizhoosh is the director of Kimia Lab (Laboratory for Knowledge Inference in Medical Image Analysis) in the Faculty of Engineering at University of Waterloo. Before he joined the University of Waterloo in 2001, he was a research associate at the Knowledge and Intelligence Systems Laboratory at the University of Toronto where he worked on AI methods such as reinforcement learning. 

Since 1993, his research activities encompass artificial intelligence, computer vision and medical imaging. He has developed algorithms for medical image filtering, segmentation and search. As well, he has introduced the "Opposition-based Learning". He is the author of two books, 14 book chapters, and more than 140 journal and conference papers. He has also filed 5 patents in collaboration with WatCo (Waterloo Commercialization Office). 

Dr. Tizhoosh has extensive industrial experience and has worked with numerous companies such as Management of Intelligent Technologies GmbH (Aachen, Germany), Image Processing Systems Inc. (Markham-based company acquired by Photon Dynamics Inc. (San Jose, CA)), and Medipattern Corporation (Toronto). Additionally, Dr. Tizhoosh has more than 10 years of experience in commercialization and start-ups. In 2007, he started Segasist Technologies, a start-up that developed image segmentation software for radiation oncology. The company raised more than $2M under his leadership, both as CEO and CTO. Presently, he is the AI advisor of Huron Digital Pathology, St. Jacobs, ON.