AI a game-changer: an interview with Joost Vennekens from KU Leuven (part 1)

In this interview with Joost Vennekens, we discuss Artificial Intelligence, how to start with AI, the game-changer that this technology represents, and its application in marketing and advertising, and more specifically in personalization.

Joost Vennekens is an Associate Professor in the KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology .
His research is on applications of Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on Knowledge Representation and Logic-based Artificial Intelligence. He collaborates with several international companies on projects to develop industrial AI applications. He is a board member of the BeNeLux Association for Artificial Intelligence and a member of the steering committee of the Leuven.AI institute.

In this first part, our question was about what AI can solve: what does it change, how does it change the way we do business, is it the game-changer that we claim to be?

Professor Joost Vennekens:

“In the past two decades, there has been remarkable progress in the domain of AI. Thanks to advances in computing Hardware, available data, so-called Deep learning methods have been able to almost completely solve many problems that many people. Believed were unsolvable. . …
in areas such as Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, the things we. That can do now are simply amazing Computer Vision :. Look at video footage and identify people, track cars, count how many people there are crowd in a, identify thounsands or different kinds of objects in real-time.
NLP: translate between different language, automatically summarize text, write descriptions of pictures that are indistinguishable from descriptions written by humans.
These are difficult and challenging tasks where Artificial Neural Networks now routinely outperform the human brain – not in artificial setting such as on chess board, but in the real world. These Deep Learning methods completely changed Computer Vision, NLP.
We are only now just starting to see what they can also mean for other domains, for instance in Industry 4.0 monitoring and improving production processes, moving to fully automated warehouses, creating “co-bots”, robots that can safely and productively collaborate with humans , and so on. “

In a second part of this interview, we will be discussing the added-value of AI in marketing and advertising.

Keywords: applications of artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, causality, uncertainty in artificial intelligence, logic-based artificial intelligence