Artificial intelligence, or AI, is rapidly advancing, but it hasn’t yet outpaced human intelligence. Our brains’ capacity for adaptability and imagination has allowed us to overcome challenges and accomplish complex tasks for millennia, while AI is just getting started.
Arizona State University Regents Professor Ying-Cheng Lai, in particular, thrives on working with complicated data and understanding chaos to advance human goals. His research focuses on how to make computing systems more capable of dealing with dynamic data, or information that changes over time.
“Memorizing sophisticated patterns is something we human beings can do — we recognize people’s faces and all kinds of things without much trouble. But if you ask a computer to do this, it will be very difficult,” says Lai, an electrical engineering faculty member in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. “In the past 20 to 30 years, lots of progress has been made, but it’s still a little bit tricky, especially if the pattern is dynamic.”