MEDFORD, Mass. – Come join us for a panel discussion on artificial intelligence (AI) on April 16 at 7 p.m. at Tufts Alumnae Lounge, 40 Talbot Ave. The event is sponsored by the Cambridge-Yerevan Sister City Association (CYSCA) in conjunction with the annual Cambridge Science Festival. It is being co-sponsored by the Tufts Armenian Club and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
The title of the panel is “Artificial Intelligence: Getting Smarter Every Day” and will be moderated by Aram Adourian. It features Vazgen Hakobjanyan, an AI expert from Armenia, as well as local experts in the field from higher education and industry. The panelists will share examples of how and when AI is being used, as well as what the future holds for this industry. AI is already being used for voice recognition, drones, and Netflix, but the future holds infinite possibilities such as robots thinking like humans, diagnosing and treating medical conditions, solving dark matter, taming climate change, cooking, and job creation (and loss), among many others.
Vazgen Hakobjanyan has been applying AI and mathematical methods throughout his career, and helped to build a number of AI teams in Armenia. He is a partner at SmartGateVC, a seed venture fund that sources startups primarily in Armenia, focusing on AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and emerging Biotech, Quantum Computing, and Blockchain. He is a co-founder at Teamable Software, where he founded and led data science and engineering departments. He also serves as a board member at YerevaNN, a non-profit computer science and mathematics research lab based in Yerevan, and at Gate42 quantum computing labs which is a scientific research group of physicists, computer scientists, and developers based in Armenia. He has previously worked as a senior R&D engineer in EDA and image processing spaces. Vazgen has a master’s degree with honors in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Yerevan State University, and teaches in the AUA MBA program and the Yerevan State University Mathematics faculty.
Aram Adourian, moderator of the panel, earned his PhD at Harvard University in statistical physics, and studied physics and mathematics at Cornell University. He recently joined Flagship Pioneering, an organization that creates breakthroughs in human health and sustainability and builds life sciences companies. He has served as chief scientific officer at BG Medicine, a company created in Flagship Labs that develops diagnostic and computational solutions to aid in the clinical management of chronic diseases. Adourian has also served as a senior researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, where he developed novel systems and computational approaches for biomolecular sequencing and modeling. His career in computational sciences spans two decades, with roles in basic and applied research, and product development and commercialization.
The program is free and open to the public, with ample parking available. Refreshments will follow.
