AI Salon

About AI Salon

AI Salon is a roughly bi-weekly event on Fridays where the AI Lab gathers to discuss high-level topics in AI and machine learning. The goal is to encourage ourselves to think beyond our individual day-to-day research, and better see how our work fits into the long-term trajectory of scientific progress, and into society as a whole. Each Salon has a different topic for discussion, which is led by two speakers: typically one expert guest, and one AI Lab member. We hold the event in the spirit of Enlightenment-era salons, with no electronics or whiteboard allowed: only free-ranging discussion among attendees, starting with a 10-minute opening statement from the two speakers.

For the 2021-22 academic year, Demi Guo (demiguo@stanford.edu), Ziang Liu (ziangliu@stanford.edu), Mirac Suzgun (msuzgun@stanford.edu), Joey Joseph Hejna III (jhejna@stanford.edu), and Chris George Agia (cagia@stanford.edu) are the organizers of AI Salon.

Time and Place

AI Salon is typically held in Room 219 (2nd floor open area) of the Gates Computer Science building. The event is held from 4-5pm, with refreshments served from 3:45pm.

Attendance Policy

AI Salon is open to all current Stanford students, postdocs and faculty. We particularly welcome those who can bring interdisciplinary perspectives to the event. Due to space limitations, any other attendees must be invited by a current member of the AI Lab.

Occasionally, AI Salon is opened up to the public – for example the AI Salon with Yann LeCun on February 2, 2018. However, this is an exception to the usual format.

Mailing List

AI Salon announcements are automatically sent to the ai-all@cs.stanford.edu mailing list. If you would like to receive notifications about upcoming AI Salon events and are not already on the ai-all list, please join the ai-salon-announce@lists.stanford.edu mailing list.

Note: you can join the ai-salon-announce even without a @stanford.edu email address. Subscribing to the ai-salon-announce list is fully automatic; follow the link and follow the instructions. You do not need to email anyone to get on the ai-salon-announce list.

Date
Title
Speaker
10/18/2019 AI & Government Dan Ho & Shireen Santosham
11/1/2019 AI & Climate Change David Rolnick, Sharon Zhou & Cindi Thompson
11/15/2019 AI & Legal Responsibility Bryan Casey & Jerry Kaplan
11/22/2019 Has the AI Revolution Come Yet? Emma Brunskill & Michael Jordan
12/6/2019 AI & Medicine Nigam Shah & Elizabeth Mormino
1/10/2020 AI & the Mind Barbara Tversky & Fei-Fei Li
1/24/2020 Unique Challenges of Physical AI Systems Manuela Veloso & Dorsa Sadigh
2/28/2020 Future of NLP Michael Auli & Chris Manning
10/9/2020 Is Consciousness a Condition for Intelligence? Wayne Wu & Wojciech Zaremba
10/23/2020 AI and the Future of Work: Societal Impact and Considerations Susan Athey & Michael Chui
11/20/2020 The Quest of Understanding Inductive Biases in Humans and for Machines Sam Gershmam & Sergey Levine
2/19/2021 AI in Computational Drug Discovery Peyton Greenside & Ron Dror
3/5/2021 Decentralized Compute for AI Greg Bowman & Percy Liang
4/23/2021 RL for Robotics Chelsea Finn & Jie Tan
5/28/2021 AI x Healthcare Matthew Lungren & Serena Yeung
10/01/2021 AI x Education Noah Goodman & Dan Schwartz
10/31/2021 Foundation Models and Their Implication Percy Liang & Tengyu Ma
12/10/2021 AI x Drug Discovery Daphne Koller & Jure Leskovec
3/4/2022 AI & Ethics Holden Karnofsky (Co-CEO of Open Philanthropy)
4/8/2022 AI & Robotics Profs. Chelsea Finn and  Dorsa Sadigh
5/6/2022 AI & Law Profs. Mark Lemley, Zach Harned, Esq., and JD-PhD candidate Peter Henderson
5/23/2022 AI & Creativity: Synergizing Art and AI: A New Era of Creativity Prof. Xie Xiaoze and DallE-2 Authors Mark Chen and Aditya Ramesh
06/3/2022 Building Blocks of AGI Andrej Karpathy and Igor Mordatch

AI Salon Event Archive