The Tech Alliance’s Discovery Series is designed to bring together the state's preeminent researchers, innovative leaders, and elected officials who want to stay on top of important advancements being made in our state, each Discovery Series program includes lunch, networking time, a Q&A session, and an opportunity to meet the speaker.
From the biology of aging to organ preservation to cancers in clams, this season is sure to captivate all! Join us for lunch on the second Friday of almost every month (Sept-June, except December) to get educated, inspired, and connected.
Interested in sponsoring? Email events@technology-alliance.com
Next up on June 12th
Speaker: Dr. Ranjay Krishna, Assistant Professor, University of Washington
What does it mean for a machine to truly understand the world—not just through language, but through sight?
Today’s most advanced AI systems can write, summarize, and reason with words. But when it comes to the visual world—understanding space, objects, and relationships—they still fall short in surprisingly fundamental ways.
Dr. Ranjay Krishna is working to close that gap.
Drawing on decades of computer vision research, his work explores how machines might learn to “think visually”—not just to recognize images, but to reason through them. By introducing new approaches like sketching and integrating visual reasoning directly into language models, his research opens up powerful new possibilities for how AI can understand and interact with the world.
From more capable multimodal systems to robots that can reason in space, this shift points toward a new generation of AI—one that engages more fully with the physical world, and expands what artificial intelligence can do next.
Location: EY, Seattle
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
