Dr. Peter Cheeseman will discuss the future of computing and information technology. While computer power and bandwidth continue to grow exponentially, the functionality of many systems is declining due to the inability of programmers to anticipate all possible interactions. True artificial intelligence, where computers understand user needs, is the solution, but it may result in computers intellectually surpassing humans. Dr. Cheeseman has a PhD in artificial intelligence planning and learning, and has conducted research in areas such as robotics, uncertainty reasoning, spatial information, clustering, and Bayesian image processing. He now leads the Symbolic Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition program at NICTA.