Full Professor of Computer Science at University of Zululand and an Emeritus Professor in the Science Faculty of Rhodes University, South Africa.
Title: How did we get here? A brief history of AI (and its ups and downs)
Abstract: While conversations about Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the large public are recent and mostly due to the breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs), the history of AI is a long one: almost as long as the history of digital computers, in fact. An understanding of its history is important to situate appropriately specific technological achievements, such as the ones relating to LLMs. This contextualization does allow us to judge what is their real significance beyond the hype that, understandably, surrounds any technological achievement that touches language, a most distinctive aspect of ours as humans. This talk will go through significant moments of the attempt at building machines that show capabilities similar to the ones of the human brain. It will do that using the particular perspective of someone who was active in AI in the early 1990s, teaching a course on it at Rhodes University, while trying to get a machine to compose music.
Biography: Alfredo Terzoli is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Zululand and an Emeritus Professor in the Science Faculty of Rhodes University, in South Africa. He has been associated to the Telkom Centre of Excellence in Distributed Multimedia at Rhodes University from 1998 to 2021, and to the one in ICT for Development at the University of Fort Hare from 1998 to 2015. Telkom Centres of Excellence are postgraduate research centres, normally hosted by the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and funded by industry partners and until 2016 by the South African government through the THRIP programme.
Prof Terzoli has always been exploring new domains and new ideas in Computer Science and its applications, from artificial intelligence (applied to the music field) to next generation help systems; from natural language processing to real-time communication in computer networks; from language difficulties encountered by non-mother-tongue students in studying Computer Science to the linguistic and cultural localization of ICT systems in Africa. No matter the field, his research has been always characterized by team building and strong interaction with end-users and other researchers, particularly postgraduate students and young researchers, something he finds stimulating and rewarding.
His main research interest has been for many years now the application of ICT to help development in marginalized areas of South Africa and Africa. For this, he has been the catalyst of a long term, multidisciplinary, large ICT for Development venture, initiated in 2005 by the Universities of Fort Hare and Rhodes. Known as the Siyakhula Living Lab (siyakhulaLL.org), the project started its operations in the deep rural communities surrounding the Dwesa Nature reserve, in the Mbhashe Municipality, in South Africa. The main focus of this venture has been to find a sustainable manner to bring marginalized rural communities within the knowledge economy, in a meaningful way. Because of this, it involved from the very beginning other departments, besides Computer Science and Information Systems: Anthropology, Education, African Languages, Journalism and, later, Sociology.
The venture built a large network of relationships among academia, government, private sector and user communities, all interested in social and economic development, both in South Africa and abroad. It also attracted and mobilized a substantial amount of resources, besides the ones in the Telkom Centres of Excellence at Rhodes and Fort Hare University. Of particular importance was the funding through COFISA and SAFIPA, two programmes partnering the South African and Finnish goverments in the areas of innovation and knowledge society. Through SAFIPA, in particular, a software start up, codenamed Reed House System, was launched, to bring the innovations developed in the Siyakhula Living Lab to the market, for the benefit of the South African society.
The operations of the ReedHouse Systems and the Siyakhula Living Lab gave life to closely related projects: the Makana Apps Factory (2014 – 2015), a partnership with the Department of Communications e-skills Institute; and the App Factory (2015-2017), a partnership with the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy, within the ‘Grandi Progetti’ framework of the Italian Foreign Ministry. A more technical research interest in the ever-evolving telecommunication industry and the building of advanced telecommunication services has been a natural support to his work in ICT for Development. And so have been his activities to increase the number of ICT practitioners that come from marginalized sections of the South African and African society. Having experienced directly the local impediments to the diffusion of meaningful technology, such practitioners are more inclined to help overcome them and hopefully change the local technological landscape.
