Recap of WAIC x SWITCH 2022 International Webinar - Towards AI4Good for a Sustainable Future
The international webinar on “AI4Good -Co-Shaping a Sustainable Future for AI” was held on August 18, 2022, covering a wide range of topics related to #AI4Good, from Decision Analysis to Ethics to why what and how to enable AI4Good as part of our sustainable future.
With a diverse group of speakers from the US, China, Europe and Singapore with a speciality in different domains of decision analysis, ethics, laws, and technologies, the 90 minutes panel featured a vibrant dialogue and insightful exchange from the following panel of speakers:
Speakers:
? Professor Ron Howard ,? 美国斯坦福大学
? Ben Feng Tian , SenseTime 商汤科技
? Dr. Yong Tao , Cloudstone
? Carlos Mu?oz Ferrandis , Hugging Face
Moderator:
? Dr. James (Kayliang) Ong , 人工智能国际研究院
The goal is to attempt to co-shape further understanding on the subject of AI4Good where regardless of what AI technologies are being innovated and how it works, we aim to achieve the following 3 purposes via this dialogue on AI4Good:
? Accelerate using AI for Good
? Avoid AI being used for Bad
? Assure AI with Trust
To facilitate a more focused discussion on the broad subject of AI4Good, Dr. James Ong, our moderator, opens the panel dialogue by providing a proposed framework of the AI4Good Triangle that links between the 3 components:
(1) Human
(2) Wisdom/Knowledge/Information/Data?
(3) AI emerging as new technology?
Some of the highlights from different speakers include:
Prof Ron Howard shared his years of experience at Stanford and MIT, pioneering the field of “decision analysis” from guiding a company making a decision for a nuclear reactor project to how “decision analysis” was coined as a 3-legged tool with alternatives. What do you know, preferences.
He pointed out that mathematics has no built-in ethics and thus, “you going to teach someone with a powerful tool that could be used for right or wrong, it is up to the teacher, who is one impacting information, to make sure they are ethically sensitive. That has to be true for AI.”
Ben Tian of SenseTime shared his aspiration since the year 2000 to use technology to change the world and has been thinking and working on emerging technologies' impact on family, development, and planning.
He also asserted at SenseTime, they always do their best to deliver AI service and solution for a good, especially for their customers in Asia. He also shared some of the best practices in terms of stringent development, review and training processes with internal governance, as well as engaging external experts to guide and review SenseTime in ensuring AI4Good product offerings.
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Dr. Tao Yong, a venture investor with deep decision analysis domain expertise, reinforces Professor Ron Howard’s viewpoint that AI is a powerful tool. As we develop AI and teach people to use AI, we should also teach ethics to build it as much as possible.
He also pointed out the risk and the necessary mitigation that hopefully, in the future we use AI, we can monitor AI as AI has self-learning capability. As it applies to situations, it probably generates results and data that it should learn from itself, hopefully reducing ethical and legal harm it might cause to society.
Carlos Munoz Ferrandis, with his law expertise, introduced the Hugging Face, a promising AI tech startup that has AI4Good built into it as its DNA. He summarised Hugging Face as the Github of Machine Learning with a focus on the open dimension of AI Governance and AI4Good.
He emphasised that he firmly believes an open and collaborative approach to machine learning is the way to go in striving for AI4Good. He also shared that BLOOM, which was recently released by BigScience, strives for inclusiveness and multi-culturalism and that it is not LLM (Large Language Model) trained just in English but also 46 human languages plus coding languages.
At the end of the dialogue, some points were agreed upon, such as AI ethics should target not just developers but also the users and the entire ecosystem and the importance to raise public awareness of AI ethics. Providing more accessible training on AI Ethics with an open online course for the public good with combined expertise from different domain experts could be an initiative to be considered.
At the same time, more intriguing questions were raised and remained unanswered.
This includes questions like whether it is feasible to teach ethics to AI and also whether it is ethical to design AI with ethics.
A very good question was also raised by one of the attendees asking about whether it is feasible to write ethics as codes to design and build ethics into AI. This new field of research on Governable AI to enable AI4Good is definitely very relevant for further dialogue and discussion in the near future.
In the end, Dr. James Ong shared and summarised his perspective on AI4Good based on a prior conversation with the speakers with a more refined framework for AI4Good and how the dots are connected between the 3 components of AI4Good. This framework is by no means complete and comprehensive but will serve as a good basis for further discussion and future research on AI4Good.
The event was attended by more than 140 participants
This is part of a series of international dialogue series towards AI4Good from August to October 2022
For a brief history of WAIC, please check out: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6958995246206656512
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