Professor Alessio Lomuscio's inaugural lecture "Explore whether autonomous machines can ever be trusted" now online.

If you missed Professor Alessio Lomuscio's inaugural lecture or would like to see it again then please follow the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTuWsNCnUU4

Original Abstract

We have long relied upon automatic systems for many mundane tasks in our lives. But much more sophisticated adaptive systems, or fully autonomous systems, have been under development and testing for the past few years.

We will shortly be able to build automobiles that can drive themselves, robot babysitters that can look after our children and the elderly, and intelligent buildings that can anticipate the needs of their inhabitants. As machines occupy a greater part of our lives, should we trust these machines to do no harm?

In this talk I will survey the novel, logic-based model checking techniques I developed with collaborators at Imperial and abroad, report on the progress we have achieved in the past 10 years, and try to suggest an answer to this question.

Biography

Alessio Lomuscio grew up in Milan, Italy, where he obtained a Laurea in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in1995 before moving to England. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham in 1999.

Before joining Imperial in 2006, he was Lecturer at King’s College London and Senior Lecturer at University College London. He currently holds an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship.

While he began his research purely on the logic underpinning autonomous agents, since 2002 he has increasingly been concerned with their verification. He is known for the development of model checking techniques for autonomous agents and their application to autonomous underwater vehicles, web-services and security protocols.

He is a keen blitz chess player, albeit one of dubious ability.