By Chuck Putney

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing in both its impact on society and its risks. It is used to compose text, monitor online activity, and assist with searches of the web—to mention just a few of the more evident uses.

Dr. Anthony Hoogs, who has been working in the AI field for decades, will speak on “Can Ethical AI Reduce the Risks of AI?” on Sunday, April 14 at 2 pm. The talk is co-sponsored by the Bennington Branch of the American Association of University Women and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. He will discuss what AI is, the risks it poses, and what the AI community is doing about them.

The session is free and open to the public at the UU Meetinghouse, 108 School St., Bennington. The building is handicapped accessible.

Dr. Hoogs (Judy Kniffin’s son-in-law, by the way), is Vice President for AI at Kitware, where he leads Kitware’s Computer Vision Team with more than 60 members, including 25 PhD’s. For more than three decades, he has supervised and performed research in various areas of computer vision including ethical and explainable AI; remote sensing; media forensics; event, activity, and behavior recognition; deep learning; object detection, recognition, and tracking; and content-based retrieval. He has led dozens of projects, sponsored by commercial companies and government entities including US Department of Defense research programs and commercial entities. His projects range from basic academic research to developing advanced prototypes and operation systems. He has been the overall Principal Investigator on multiple large Defense Department programs, for which he was responsible for overseeing collaborations with more than 25 universities and more than ten commercial subcontractors. Previously at GE Global Research (1998-2007), Dr. Hoogs led a team of researchers in video and imagery analysis on projects sponsored by the US Government, Lockheed Martin, and NBC Universal.

Dr. Hoogs received a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998; an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991; and a B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1989. He has published more than 100 papers in computer vision, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing.