How do people turn old memories into new ideas, and can AI do the same? Dr. Haixun Wang will explain, in plain language, how memory, imagination, and creativity connect, and where today's AI systems still fall short of human originality. If you have a question you'd like to ask Dr. Wang, please submit it using the form on the right. We'll gather questions from the community and have three student volunteers ask a selection of them live during the talk.
Click here to register with Cary Library (separate from the question form)
Together with Dr. Wang and the PEAAII program at UMass Boston, we're studying how the Lexington community thinks about AI memory, imagination, and creativity, before and after the talk. The questions submitted below, along with a short post-event reflection, will inform a joint report we plan to publish in the PEAAII ScholarWorks collection.
Before you submit a question: we ask a couple of quick context questions (adult or student, and if a student, grade level and public/private school). This is only to help us understand who in the community is engaging with AI topics, and it's optional.
This event is a partnership between Cary Library, the Youth STEAM Initiative (YSI), and UMass Boston. Our goal is to help promote the talk to the Lexington community in multiple languages, and to give the community a direct way to ask Dr. Wang a question. We'll collect question submissions through the form above, and three student volunteers will present a selection of the community's questions during the talk.
Dr. Haixun Wang is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, a VLDB board trustee, and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. He currently serves as VP of Engineering and Head of AI at EvenUp, where he works on applying large language models to legal and medical document understanding. He previously held AI and applied science leadership roles at Instacart, WeWork, Amazon, and Meta, and was a researcher at Microsoft, Google, and IBM.
Organizing team: Eric Gu, Stephen Yang, Grace Li, Juliana Yin
