IJCAI-07 Keynote and Invited Speakers

A grand challenge for AI in developing economies is improving the quality of life of the 4 billion people at the bottom of the pyramid who subsist on less than $2,000 per year income. One critical component of improving the quality of life is access to information and knowledge that is helpful for education, healthcare, food, and agriculture in rural communities. This talk will review why the world’s poor have more to gain in relative terms by the effective use of the IT and AI technology and review the barriers that make it difficult to realize the potential benefits. The challenges are even more acute in a polyglot nation like India with 21 official languages and where nearly 40 percent of the population cannot read or write. It is not enough to overcome basic technical challenges of connectivity divide, and computer access divide — we have to deal with literacy divide and language divide issues also. This talk will discuss the unfinished research agenda of AI problems of spoken language understanding, dialog modeling, multimedia synthesis, and language generation, multilingual indexing and retrieval, language translation, and summarization.