There is no better time than today to be in computer science, The computer is absolutely everywhere, And while artificial intelligence isn’t everywhere, Yet, it’s poised to transform absolutely everything.

When I was a kid, the message was clear, intelligent systems were going to kill us all. Today, the message is a little bit more nuanced, but they’re going to do is they’re going to replace us, they’re going to take our jobs, they’re going to take our industries, they’re going to change everything and make us irrelevant.

We’re being asked to make decisions about some of the most powerful technologies in the world on the basis of fear, urgency, and embarrassment, not exactly optimal decision making.

At Northwestern, we’re crafting Technologies that are integrated with who we are, what we do, and how we work together.

We are building technologies that will neither replace people or augment them, but instead partner with them. So that we can create a synthetic intelligence that is better, smarter than either side by itself.

The thing is, we have to do this, we have to invest in AI, if only to deal with the massive data that we’re now confronted.

On a daily basis, we gather about 2.5 zettabytes of data is the equivalent of a quarter of a million libraries of Congress, or the equivalent of 500 books for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth every single day.

That’s not data that we can deal with him. The scale of that is no longer human. There is an incredible wealth of data out there about our lives, about crime, immigration, traffic, stocks, and bonds our health.

The Machine is capturing every single piece of data associated with what can be metered and monitor. And our goal, our goal is to meter and monitor everything.

Fortunately, this is exactly what the new Technologies of intelligence do. Well, they’re able to take the data we find daunting and use it to power things like Netflix and Amazon’s ability to give us recommendations.

Language is what connects human beings with each other. If we’re going to partner with the machine, we need systems that can understand language and generate language so they can interact with us.

If we don’t do this, then we’ll never have access to this incredible wealth of information and the data that the Machines gather.

For example, the city of Chicago actually has sensors up and down the lakefront gathering information about water quality, they take that information and publish it as tables machine can look at that.

It can take this data and turn it into language that anyone in the city of Chicago who can read, can understand and take action.

One of the Strengths of Northwestern is an interdisciplinary approach impacting another field that’s simply part of our DNA.

And it’s the core of McCormick’s whole brain engineering approach, We strive to draw students eyes away from the screen into the world they’re shaping.

We want them to know that every decision that they make at the level of the algorithm is also a decision that could have impact on the lives of millions.