Introduction

Artificial Intelligence: State of the Art and Current Directions

Artificial intelligence has moved, in barely a decade, from a research curiosity to a technology that is reshaping the economy and society. This talk traces that trajectory, from the early rivalry between symbolic and connectionist approaches to the deep learning revolution that finally made machines competent at exactly the perceptual tasks Moravec identified as the hardest to program. Four developments — deep convolutional networks, deep reinforcement learning, diffusion models, and transformer-based language and vision-language models — account for most of what has surprised us, and their applications now run from medical imaging and drug discovery to marketing, finance, transportation, design, and scientific research itself. What is changing now is less the models than what is built around them: context engineering, retrieval, tool use, and explicit reasoning are turning models into systems, and those systems into agents that plan, remember, and act in the world with growing autonomy. Several major laboratories are now explicitly pursuing artificial general intelligence, raising the prospect of machines as capable, as powerful, and perhaps even as conscious as ourselves. Long before that point is reached, the systems already being deployed raise hard questions about employment, inequality, privacy, and the concentration of power. The talk closes with the questions that matter most: if such systems do come into existence, what will their social, legal, and ethical implications be, and how much time do we have to prepare for them?

Arlindo Oliveira received his BSc and MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and his PhD in the same field from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at MIT and a researcher at INESC, CERN, the Electronics Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Cadence Laboratories, and the University of Tokyo. He is a distinguished professor at IST, president of INESC, visiting professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology, non-executive director of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, and a researcher at INESC-ID. He has published five books, translated into several languages, and hundreds of scientific articles in international journals and conferences in the field.

How to navigate a mathematical modelling module through GenAI?

TBA

TBA

Closing discussion and next steps