Abstract: Project Debater is the first AI system that can meaningfully debate a human opponent. The system, an IBM Grand Challenge, was designed to build coherent, convincing speeches on its own, as well as provide rebuttals to the opponent's main arguments. In 2019, Project Debater competed against Harish Natarajan, who holds the world record for most debate victories, in an event held in San Francisco that was broadcasted live world-wide. In this talk I will tell the story of Project Debater, present the results of systematic evaluation of the system performance (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03215-w), and discuss recent work that emerged from this Grand Challenge effort.

Short Bio: Noam Slonim is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research AI. He received his doctorate from the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University and held a post-doc position at the Genomics Institute at Princeton University. Noam joined the IBM Israel Research Lab in 2007, and in 2011 he proposed to develop Project Debater. He has been serving as the Principal Investigator of the project since then, and more recently has been working on utilizing language models in practice, to address large scale text classification problems