Conversations on AI: Blackwell at 107

The familiar story of AI often begins with John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, which helped shape the field in its modern form. But that story is incomplete: it focuses heavily on computation and symbolic intelligence while overlooking foundational contributions to learning, inference, and decision-making under uncertainty, including foundational work developed by Dr. David Blackwell at Howard University and UC Berkeley.

Held in honor of Dr. Blackwell’s 107th birthday and as part of the Berkeley Forward: Conversations on AI series, this panel offers a fitting occasion not only to celebrate his life, but also to bring his ideas into clearer focus. Blackwell’s influence extends well beyond statistics. The Rao-Blackwell theorem remains central to modern estimation and machine learning, while his work on approachability offers a powerful framework for repeated decision-making, adaptation, and strategic learning. Centering Blackwell in this conversation honors his legacy and helps secure his place within the intellectual foundations of AI.

Featured panelists:

• Dr. Talithia Washington, Executive Director of the Howard University Center for Applied Data Science & Analytics (CADSA)
• Dr. Jessica Tour Chayes, founding dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) at the University of California, Berkeley
• Dr. Bin Yu, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley
• Dr. Peter Bartlett, Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind
• Moderator: Dr. Napoleon Paxton, Chief Innovation Officer at AI Squared, and a Lecturer in UC Berkeley’s MIDS and MICS programs

The evening will begin with a social hour (6 – 7 p.m.), followed by recorded remarks by the Chancellor, panel discussion, and video presentation (7 – 8:30 p.m.).

Light refreshments will be served.

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