An upcoming course on cognitive science, artificial intelligence and embodiment held by Balázs Kégl, researcher at Huawei Research, Paris.

MCC's Learning Institute announces four English-language seminars for university students entitled "AI and the Meaning Crisis". The seminar is held by Balázs Kégl, a researcher at Huawei Research, Paris.

A seminar is an hour and a half long, and requires reading. A maximum of twenty people can come, so we will be selective. The more diverse the team, the better.

The course will be on selected topics in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and embodiment. It is experimental both in its content and in its format.

The basic premise of the course is that some phenomena (for example, cognition, consciousness, AI) need to be studied from a first-person stance, placing me, the scientist, in the center of investigation. Thus, the subject of the course is not only what I know, but also how I arrived here, and how my knowledge and my self shaped each other in the process.

You will learn about the following three topics:

1. The framework and language proposed by John Vervaeke, a prominent cognitive scientist whose work has been one of the cornerstones of third-generation cognitive science.

2.  Visible advances of AI (visual object categorization and detection, recommendation systems, language models, image generation algorithms, self-driving) analyzed within the framework.

3. My way of arriving to where I am. Significant life events and my ecology of practices (particularly embodiment; some of which we will experiment with during the course), equally analyzed within Vervaeke’s framework, that have afforded the integration of myself, the scientist, into my own worldview.

We will start with four 90-minute seminars, starting on the 13th of January at 14:00p.m., every other Friday (so January 27, February 10, February 24), optionally continuing towards the spring.

You can apply for attendance with any background, by sending your CV and a short motivation letter to Janos Setenyi at MCC Tanuláskutató Intézet, (setenyi.janos@mcc.hu) until the 10th of December 2022.

The course will be free, but you will engage to attend all four seminars.