The AI Disruption Speaker Series: Jeff Clune

Jeff Clune is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and a Senior Research Advisor at DeepMind. Jeff focuses on deep learning, including deep reinforcement learning. Previously he was a research manager at OpenAI, a Senior Research Manager and founding member of Uber AI Labs (formed after Uber acquired a startup he helped lead), the Harris Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Wyoming, and a Research Scientist at Cornell University. He received degrees from Michigan State University (PhD, master’s) and the University of Michigan (bachelor’s). More on Jeff’s research can be found at JeffClune.com or on X (@jeffclune).  He has won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, had two papers in Nature, one in Science, and one in PNAS, won an NSF CAREER award, received multiple Outstanding Paper of the Decade and Distinguished Young Investigator awards, a Test of Time award, and had best paper awards, oral presentations, and invited talks at the top machine learning conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, and ICML). His research is regularly covered in the world’s top press outlets.

Abstract:
Foundation models (e.g. large language models) create exciting new opportunities in our longstanding quests to produce open-ended and AI-generating algorithms, wherein agents can truly keep innovating and learning forever. In this talk, I will introduce quality diversity, open-ended, and AI-generating algorithms and share some of our recent work harnessing the power of foundation models to unleash their potential. I will cover our recent work including OMNI (Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness), Video Pre-Training (VPT), Automatically Designing Agentic Systems (ADAS), the Darwin Gödel Machine, and The AI Scientist. 

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Fall on the new theme of “The AI Disruption.” Our speakers will discuss how recent advances in AI have reshaped their research — what has been made easier and what has become more difficult — and reflect upon its broader disruptive impact on society.

We meet most Wednesdays, 9am-10am Central time, in Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend. More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series webpage. For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list. Our Fall series is led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.