BELMONT: What is Artificial Intelligence? How Does It Work?
Wednesday, November 4, 2026 · 6:30 PM EST · Lower Merion Library System · Bala Cynwyd, PA
Get more events like this
Free daily picks for live events around Bala Cynwyd. No account needed.
Reminders arrive the day before, with our daily picks. Unsubscribe any time.
About this event
Belmont Hills Library, Belmont Hills Library. AI has become a part of daily life for many of us, but do we know the fundamentals? Learn exactly what AI is and how it works from expert Dr. Mitch Marcus, RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. This talk will help you understand how AI chatbots work and whether or not they "really understand," and answer your questions about the possibility of super-intelligent AI in the near future. Registration is required for this program. Dr. Mitch Marcus is RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence Emeritus in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was also Professor of Linguistics. He received an AB from Harvard University in Linguistics and Applied Math, and a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1978. In the early 1990s, he developed the Penn Treebank, which has been widely used for the past 40 years to train statistical natural language processing systems. More recently, he ran a multi-university team developing natural language interfaces for autonomous robots and has developed cognitively plausible models for automatically learning linguistic structure. He is a fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence, a founding fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and served for over a decade as chair of the advisory board of the Center of Excellence in Human Language Technologies at Johns Hopkins University. He has served as chair of Penn's Computer and Information Science Department, as chair of the Penn Faculty Senate, chair of the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute, and president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Description from lmls.libcal.com