Lecture by Prof. KRIM (North Carolina State Univ.), a visiting foreign faculty member (designated professor) on November 5, 2025

Date & Time: Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 2:45pm–4:15pm
Venue: Room 071, North, IB Electronics & Information Bldg.
Speaker: Professor Hamid KRIM (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University)
Title:The Arduous Journey to AI: An Ongoing Pursuit
Language: English
Registration: Open to all / No prior registration required
 

Abstract:

Over the past three decades, advances in neuroscience and neurocognitive science—particularly the pioneering work of Kahneman and Tversky on Fast and Slow learning systems—have rekindled the quest for True Artificial Intelligence.
In this talk, following a brief overview of my collaborative research with Professor Fujii's Laboratory at Nagoya University, I will revisit the System 1/System 2 paradigm and discuss its still–elusive realization in today's AI architectures.
Despite significant theoretical and computational advances that have moved us beyond the traditional “black box" view of neural networks, the challenge of achieving reasoning and understanding akin to human cognition remains unresolved. I will argue that much of the progress in data science has emerged from unifying principles and systematic variations on common themes, and that the key to True AI may lie in the integration of these principles within a coherent System 1/System 2 framework.
Through conceptual and geometric arguments, I will illustrate the continuity of methodologies—from linear estimation and statistical learning, through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Dictionary Learning, to modern Deep Learning. This progression offers both insight and direction toward bridging intuitive (System 1) and deliberative (System 2) computation. Throughout the talk, examples on real data will be presented to ground these ideas in practice.

Biography:
Hamid Krim (ahk@ncsu.edu) (FIEEE) received his BSc. MSc. And Ph.D. in ECE. He has spent many years as a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs, where he has conducted research and development in the areas of telephony and digital communication systems/subsystems. Following his NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Foreign Centers of Excellence at LSS/University of Orsay, Paris, France, he joined the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA  as  a Research Scientist. He was also a recipient of a Junior Faculty Fellow by the Japanese Society for Progress in Science and Engineering at Univ. of Tokyo. He is presently Professor of Electrical Engineering in the ECE Department, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, leading the Vision, Information and Statistical Signal Theories and Applications group. His research interests are in statistical signal and image analysis and mathematical modeling, Machine Learning and AI with a keen emphasis on applied problems in classification and recognition using geometric and topological tools and Industry.