AI and Your Best Self — Hot Science, Cool Talks

AI that leaves the screen

UT Austin's Environmental Science Institute brings its Hot Science – Cool Talks series to artificial intelligence, with Dr. Kristen Grauman as speaker. Grauman is a professor of computer science at UT Austin who leads the university's Computer Vision Group; she took her PhD at MIT in 2006 and was elected to UT's Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2017.

The talk's argument is that AI is moving out of chatbots and browser windows and into physical space. Next-generation systems are learning to see, understand, and act in the world the way a person does — coaching you through an unfamiliar skill, guiding you through a place you have never been, or watching an everyday task and offering feedback as you go. Grauman frames this around what it could mean for making personalized learning far more widely available.

Schedule

• 5:30–6:40 p.m. — "Cool Activities," a hands-on hour before the lecture
• 7:00–8:00 p.m. — the talk itself

Registering

This is a free public science lecture, deliberately pitched at general audiences and families rather than at practitioners — the activities hour is built with younger attendees in mind. Researchers and engineers will find it a clear survey of embodied and egocentric computer vision from someone doing the work, rather than a technical deep dive.

Note on registration: the Eventbrite ticket page the organizer links to was not resolving when this listing was last checked — the ticketing link returns an error, although ESI's own event page still lists the talk as scheduled with no cancellation notice. Use the official ESI page linked here and register from there once the ticket link is restored; the talk itself is confirmed.

Held on the UT Austin campus in Welch Hall, with the activities in the Grand Hallway and the lecture in the 2.224 auditorium.