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News Items

World’s First Human-AI Panel

I/ITSEC Human-AI Panel Imagines the Future of Learning & Training

AI Panelist “Charlie” adds perspective on AI’s Role in the Future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize how we train and learn, but how? To picture that future one must turn to the experts—both human and AI itself. At I/ITSEC 2019, the world’s largest modeling, simulation, and training conference, “Imagine 2030: AI Empowered Learning” was a first-of-its-kind discussion featuring a panel of five human experts and one highly advanced, artificially intelligent bot, all sharing their perspectives on the impact of AI on learning and training.

Imagine 2030 - AI-Empowered LearningJust as AI is expected to be embedded in learning in the future, AI was embedded into the panel discussion itself, adding an entirely new and unscripted perspective. While the senior expert panelists laid out their visions, Charlie the AI panelist, powered by the latest advances in AI, creatively answered questions providing its own vision in real-time.

Moderated by former I/ITSEC Industry Keynote Speaker Daniel Serfaty, Founder and CEO of Aptima, Inc., on Wednesday, December 4, 2019, this standing-room-only event brought together a panel representing diverse perspectives from the military, industry, research, academia, and AI itself, including:

  • Colonel Robert H. “Hammerhead” Epstein, USAF Commander, Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation (AFAMS)
  • Sae Schatz, Ph.D., Director, Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative
  • Benjamin Nye, Ph.D., Director of Learning Sciences, University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies
  • Ulrik Christensen, M.D., Executive Chairmen and Founder, Area9
  • Charlie, AI-Empowered Panelist, Aptima, Inc

“AI is largely experimental today, but as it continues to mature and evolve, it will teach, learn, and collaborate alongside us in what have traditionally been human-only activities,” said Daniel Serfaty, Aptima’s CEO. “Humans and AI each bring unique skillsets, and their synergy together will offer more than the sum of the individual parts.”

While the human panelists, each recognized leaders in their fields, leveraged decades of advanced education and domain expertise to the discussion, Charlie brought its own impressive background. Built on the latest AI, deep learning, text to speech, and generative language models, Charlie absorbed data, understood language, and made inferences to create new ideas about the future of training and learning. Charlie’s education comes from digesting and processing gigabytes of content to develop its language skills, and the full library of I/ITSEC conference proceedings and journals for its domain expertise. Before and after the panel, Charlie continued discussions with visitors in the Aptima I/ITSEC booth (#2401).

“What surprised me the most—as the moderator—was how smoothly the human panelists interacted with Charlie,” added Serfaty. “It appeared very natural for them to pick up on something Charlie said and for Charlie to pick on something they said. There was a lot of lateral dialog going back and forth. Colonel Epstein even asked Charlie whether AI is going to replace all of our jobs and she answered by being very precise about the degree to which AI is going take over certain functions of our jobs, not our jobs themselves, and then told us all to get over it because AI is here to stay.”

“The way Charlie fit into the panel so naturally says something very important about us as human beings: we are more ready than we care to admit about the presence and participation of artificial intelligence in our lives.”

For more information on The Interservice/ Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), please visit https://www.iitsec.org/