The Intelligent Web

As we use the web for social networking, shopping and news, we leave a personal trail. If you linger over a webpage selling something, that product will appear as you move around the Internet, tempting you to make a purchase. And search engines now look deep into the data on the web to pull out instances of the word you are looking for.

These are just basic examples of the growth of ‘web intelligence’, and increasingly sophisticated algorithms are operating on the vast and growing amount of data on the web: sifting, selecting, comparing, aggregating and correcting, following simple but powerful rules to decide what matters. While original optimism for Artificial Intelligence declined, this new kind of machine intelligence has emerging as the web has grown ever larger and more interconnected.

Dr Gautam Shroff, Chief Scientist for TCS Research based in Delhi, India and Prof David Roberston from the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh take us on a journey through the computer science of search, natural language, text mining, machine learning, swarm computing, and semantic reasoning, from Watson to self-driving cars; demonstrating how this machine intelligence may even mimic at a basic level what happens in the brain.

Held in the main hall.