phone while driving at 100km/h in your car on the highway is due to AI. But most people don’t realise that this is the case. Another example is the use of navigator apps, such as Google Maps. Again, this is powered by AI, but most people don’t realise it, and don’t think of it as AI.
ensure that humans will trust the decisions made by machines is if machines can explain their decisions to us, and those explanations are acceptable to us. Travel and perspective Meyer, who has worked in various countries and travelled extensively, has always been struck by two things: The first one is that different groups of people, sometimes in the same country, or even in the same city, approach problem solving in very different ways. Paradoxically, many people seem to think that the approach they adopt is universal. That is, they tend to think that everyone else looks at a problem from the same perspective – their perspective. The second is that despite these differences, people across the world share the same core values. There is a universality underneath it all – a common humanity, according to him. During a research visit to Sydney, Australia in 1999, he met his personal and professional mentor, University of New South Wales professor and scientist Norman Foo: I was privileged to have known Norman from 1999 until his untimely passing in 2015. Norman was a colleague, but a friend, first and foremost. It is hard to overestimate the enormous influence that he had on me as a researcher and academic, but also as a person. Whenever I have a difficult decision to make I tend to sit back and ask myself what Norman would have done. I can recall more than one instance where Norman defused a potentially explosive situation with a well-timed joke, and in doing so, restoring a sense of cohesion and camaraderie among the researchers involved. The UJ effect A number of people at UJ helped shape Meyer’s understanding of what a university is and should be. In terms of computer science, Jan Eloff of the Department of Computer Science helped him understand what the discipline
entails. More generally, the philosophy of Science Lecturer Johannes Heidema opened the world of science and academia as a whole: Heidema was both a mathematician and a philosopher, a rare and interesting combination which helps to pave the way for interdisciplinary approaches to research. As a concrete example of this, he was my PhD supervisor, but he also supervised a colleague of mine in Philosophy, Emma Ruttkamp- Bloem, who is now a professor in Philosophy. The fact that Emma and I can collaborate on technical papers is testament to Johannes’ abilities. Theunis Smith, Meyer’s MSc supervisor, introduced him to research and showed him the value of a formal, rigorous approach to research in Computer Science. As a mentor and teacher, Meyer says when he looks at his students, he sees himself and his fellow students in them: On the face of it circumstances are very different today compared to the time that I was a student. But at its core, today’s students struggle with the same basic issues that my fellow students and I did 30 years ago. The most important thing his students have taught him, is to listen to them, and the most important thing he would tell today’s students is that everyone makes mistakes. “When this happens to you, and it will, do not beat yourself up over it. Try to use it as a learning experience.” Prof Meyer obtained various degrees from the then Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg), including an MSc (Computer Science) in 1986, a BSc Honours (Computer Science) with distinction in 1985, and a BSc (Computer Science, Mathematical Statistics) in 1984.
International recognition Meyer, a full professor in the
Department of Computer Science at UCT, a UCT Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, and Co- Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), is recognised internationally as an expert in knowledge representation and reasoning. He is one of only three South African Computer Scientists to have obtained an A-rating from the South African National Research Foundation and was recently elected as a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). The field of knowledge representation and reasoning, as the name suggests, is concerned with two aspects, he says, namely: • The way in which we structure and represent our knowledge about the world. • The way in which we use these structures to reason about the world and make decisions. Meyer explains that: The representation part is important, since it allows machines to be able to explain and justify the decisions they make to humans. That ability helps to curb any potential biases creeping into the decisions made by machines: if we as humans know how a machine came to its decision, we can decide whether to that decision is morally acceptable to us. And the reasoning part is important because if the decisions are based on faulty reasoning, the explanations and justifications will also be faulty. This means that these decisions will not be acceptable to humans. The only way in which we can
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