As a guest of FIAS, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, gave his lecture Artificial Intelligence on 23 March. Due to the high level of interest, the event was moved to the larger lecture hall H3 at the Otto Stern Centre of Goethe University Frankfurt, where it drew a full audience.

Made possible at short notice through the efforts of FIAS Senior Fellow Jochen Triesch, the event brought an internationally leading AI researcher to Frankfurt. Schmidhuber is Director of IDSIA in Switzerland and Director of the AI Initiative at KAUST in Saudi Arabia.

In his talk, he placed the development of modern AI since around 1990 into historical context and discussed how AI has already begun to affect the lives of billions of people. At the same time, he explored how these developments may continue in the future, including their societal, economic, and technological implications.

The strong turnout underlined the broad interest in artificial intelligence across disciplines: visitors from FIAS, Goethe University, and other institutions attended the event.