AIR Seminar Series: Oriol Vinyals Speaks to a Standing-Room-Only Audience at Kilachand

Earlier this week, Oriol Vinyals, Senior Staff Research Scientist from Google DeepMind, gave a talk on the StarCraft gaming program called AlphaStar to a packed room at the Kilachand Center. Vinyals holds a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley and is a recipient of the 2016 MIT TR35 innovator award. His research has been featured multiple times at the New York Times, BBC, etc., and his articles have been cited over 36,000 times.

In his talk, he highlighted how the AlphaStar program is the first artificial intelligence to defeat a top professional StarCraft player. “AlphaStar acts at 280 actions per minute (APM), less than a professional player at 500 APM. However, the AlphaStar’s burst APM reached as high as 900 APM.” He concluded his talk with this quote, “behind every great agent is a great environment”. 

Oriol Vinyal’s talk was part of the 2019 AIR Seminar Speaker Series at the Hariri Institute for Computing. The primary research focus of the AIR Initiative is on new computational models aimed at general artificial intelligence, i.e. agents that exhibit the skills and learning capacity close to those of biological intelligence (human or animal). To learn more about upcoming AIR Seminar talks please visit: https://www.bu.edu/hic/centers-initiatives-labs/air/seminars/