AI and Blockchain seem to be the new hammer -- making everything look like a nail, but are AI and Blockchain really necessary to solve most of the world's problems? What could AI do for Blockchain? AI LA's Third Thursday Talk Topic is Blockchain and we plan to get down and dirty discussing viable use cases and debunking all of the hype around two of the most overused buzzwords with some of the top minds working in both fields. Thank you to our amazing partners Phase Two, Semio.ai, LAtoken, and ObEN for helping us keep this event FREE!

Some Web searches are easy to think of and describe, but complicated to conduct. If, for instance, you want to find "a nonstop flight from Las Vegas to San Diego next week on JetBlue," you have to fill out a bevy of fields on a travel site. SkyPhrase, a startup created by Nick Cassimatis, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will soon offer software that lets companies turn natural language questions like the one above into a format that their databases can handle. Facebook's new search tool, Graph Search, highlights both the progress that's being made in natural language processing and the difficulties that remain. Unlike the old search bar, Graph Search lets users enter queries as they might speak them.

Academia is supposed to be a place where creative types can be free, and with that freedom accomplish great things, whether it be new art, breakthrough treatises, scientific discoveries, or feats of engineering. But academia isn't what it used to be, and to provide some insights into some of its problems, I compared notes with friend and former colleague, Nick Cassimatis, who is associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer. In our own ways, he and I have found severe limitations in academia today, limitations that led to my leaving academia to co-found a research institute, 2AI to be funded by intellectual property, and that led Nick to start his own company outside academia, SkyPhrase in order to achieve his ambitions in artificial intelligence. Nick's romantic ambitions started early – he began research into artificial intelligence and natural language at the precocious age of fifteen, and wrote a French-to-English translation program that helped put him on the Top-20 High School Students List by USA Today. More than simply artificial intelligence, his aim is to understand human-level intelligence, and how it can come about via many unintelligent parts.