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Georgia Koutrika, Research Director at the Information Management Systems Institute of the Athena Research Center, participated as a guest speaker in the discussion titled "Documentary and Artificial Intelligence: An Exploratory Relationship," organized by the Greek Documentary Association in collaboration with the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival on Thursday, 14 March, 2024.

Dr Koutrika, responding to the topic, stated: "If I had to describe the relationship between humans and machines, it's a relationship under investigation. The machine looks at the human and says 'what is a human, I want to mimic you,' the human looks at the machine and says 'what are you doing now?'. At the Athena Research Center, we conduct research on Artificial Intelligence. AI is a branch of computer science that tries to develop intelligent computing systems. That is, programs and machines that mimic human intelligence. That is, our ability to learn, to solve problems, to walk. When we talk about machine learning, we refer to the ability of programs to learn, to look into data and discover patterns and correlations, which they can then use to make predictions and decisions for us."

Koutrika used the example of Netflix. "For each of us, the screen we see when we open Netflix is completely different. The reason is that behind the system, many algorithms run that try to see what people consume, in what order they watch movies, etc. So, they decide what to show us. However, the applications that have flooded our lives today are everywhere. For example, in the USA, such systems are used in education to decide which students to accept in admissions exams. They are used in health and in the military, which funds such research. In 2016, we had Google Translate. Progress has been made in image recognition. The most important applications, however, are in medicine, helping in faster drug preparation. In industry and in autonomous cars. We also have Generative AI, which is the area of Artificial Intelligence that you give something to and it generates content for you. It can be text like Google Translate or ChatGPT that we see a lot today. It can be an image like DALL-E, but also a combination of video and music."

Then, Georgia Koutrika referred to the other side, how humans perceive Artificial Intelligence and wonder how it works. "Artificial Intelligence essentially steals the idea from how we humans function. Our mind is a set of neurons, where each neuron is a small unit, which receives a signal at the input and, once activated, gives a signal at the output, which in turn may activate other neurons. This idea was born from scientists in 1945. The neuron, for scientists, is a function. One layer of neurons learns and feeds the next. For example, GPT-4, which preceded ChatGPT, has 100 billion neurons. Roughly, we have the same number."

More about the discussion that took place during the Workshop as part of the 26th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, as well as about the Festival itself, can be found here.

Photo Source: Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival.