Professor Marc Mézard, Director of l’École normale supérieure, Paris, France, will deliver the Abdus Salam Distinguished Lecture Series 2020. Marc Mézard is a theoretical physicist. He received a PhD from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, followed by a post-doc in Rome, and became the head of the statistical physics group in Paris-Sud University. He has been the director of École normale supérieure since 2012. His main field of research is the statistical physics of disordered systems and its use in various branches of science - biology, economics and finance, information theory, computer science, statistics, and signal processing. In recent years his research has focused on information processing in neural networks. He has received the Lars Onsager prize from the American Physical Society, the Humboldt-Gay-Lussac prize, the silver medal of CNRS and the Ampere prize of the French Academy of Science. He is a member of the European Academy of Science Three talks in the Salam 2020 lecture series are scheduled: Lecture 1 (Monday 27 January @ 16.30 hrs) - Artificial Intelligence: success, limits, myths and threats Abstract: Artificial Intelligence is about to have a dramatic impact on many sectors of human activity. In the last ten years, thanks to the development of machine learning in “deep networks”, we have experienced spectacular breakthroughs in diverse applications such as automatic interpretation of images, speech recognition, consumer profiling, or go and chess playing. Algorithms are now competing with the best professionals at analyzing skin cancer symptoms or detecting specific anomalies in radiology; and much more is to come. Worrisome perspectives are frequently raised, from massive job destruction to autonomous decision-making “warrior” robots. In this talk, we shall open the black box of deep networks and explore how they are programmed to learn from data by themselves. This will allow us to understand their limits, to question whether their achievements have anything to do with “intelligence”, and to reflect on the foundations of scientific intelligence The second and third lectures in this year's series will take place as follows: Lecture 2 (Tuesday 28 January @ 16.30 hrs) "The spin glass cornucopia" Lecture 3 (Wednesday 29 January @ 11.00 hrs) "Statistical physics of inference and machine learning" See separate entries in the scientific calendar for related details. The talks will be livestreamed from the ICTP website. Light refreshments will be served afterwards. All are welcome to attend the events. The Abdus Salam Distinguished Lecture Series receives generous support from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). For more information see: https://kfas.ictp.it/