John Carson Email & Phone Number

After graduating from MIT in 1961 with a BS in Physics and Philosophy, I became involved in designing a space sensor system that could detect and track enemy nuclear missiles, but it failed to distinguish them from false alarms, even though a human could easily tell the difference. This sparked my curiosity about how I could create a system that would perform as well as a human. Solving this problem became my central career goal, and in 1967, I co-founded a company that specialized in smart sensor systems for space, which later became Irvine Sensors Corporation (ISC). By 1968, I had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring HAL, a sentient robot with full awareness and conversational skills. This movie inspired me, and many others, to create a machine with such capabilities. After many attempts and failures, artificial electronic neural networks that imitate some aspects of the brain’s structure were developed. These became the core technology for what we now call Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has made great strides in the past decade thanks to machine learning (aka deep learning), which has created better algorithms, more powerful computers, and a tremendous amount of data. However, machine learning is still limited by its inability to perform higher-level cognitive functions that are natural in the biological brain. AI today is not truly “intelligent” in the way we understand it. Current AI systems have difficulties with reasoning and can make serious mistakes when faced with unexpected inputs. For instance, a self-driving car may fail to recognize a stop sign that is partially obscured by a tree branch, or a facial recognition system may misidentify a person as a criminal. These errors can have fatal consequences. My early insight was that to create a machine that could mimic human self-awareness and conscious decision making, I had to emulate the part of our brain that is responsible for our consciousness and executive decision-making. At Irvine Sensors, we are leading the way in this new era of embedded intelligence, where we aim to overcome the current AI limitations by adding a self-aware executive agent, our unique Hyper Aware Logic (HAL) system, that can direct the AI decision-making process. HAL is more than just an AI system; it is an AI system with a mind of its own.

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  Massachusetts Institute Of Technology

  Physics