12:00–1:30 pm
Data Science Institute, Room 105 Data Science Institute, Room 105, 5460 S University Ave
The University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Department of Statistics, Department of Computer Science, and Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics are proud to announce our 2025-26 Distinguished Speaker Series. Join us for stimulating talks from leading data science and AI researchers exploring and expanding the fundamental methods and applications that transform large and complex datasets into knowledge and action.
Abstract: “Life” and “intelligence” are terms with heavily contested meanings. This talk will present a novel perspective on both, beginning with the surprising observation, first made by von Neumann around 1950, that general computation is at the heart of any living system. Experiments in artificial life (ALife) have now allowed us to observe the emergence of life from random initial conditions (abiogenesis), in the process suggesting a central role in evolution for “symbiogenesis,” the symbiotic merger of existing replicators to form novel ones. When computational entities enter into symbiotic relationships, they must model each other, and when they merge, computational parallelism enables them to become both more complex to model and more powerful as modelers. The ensuing “intelligence explosion” feedback dynamics are familiar to evolutionary neurobiologists who have explored the relationships between troop size and brain scaling among highly social animals, including hominins. In the perspective presented here, the evolution of life, the major evolutionary transitions (including the emergence of nervous systems and brains), intelligence explosions among highly intelligent species, and even the development of advanced technologies like AI can be understood as stages in an ongoing process of computational symbiogenesis.
Bio: Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on fundamental research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life.
In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.
A frequent public speaker, he has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book, What Is Life?, is part 1 of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, published September 2025.