We hosted a half-day event on May 25th at the European Parliament, Paul-Henri Spaak Building, Rue Wiertz 60, 1047 Brussels, Belgium, titled Beyond ChatGPT: How can Europe get in front of the pack on Generative AI Models?, organized by a broad consortium from science and civil society.
The organizing committee included the HumanE-AI-Net European Network of Centres of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) under the auspices of UNESCO, the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence in Europe (CLAIRE), and other ICT-48 networks such as TAILOR, AI4Media, and VISION, and language projects like ELG and ELE
The event was a sussces and included the following speakers: Paul Lukowicz, Cees Snoek, Fredrik Heintz, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Virginia Dignum, Ieva Martinkenaite, Francesca Rossi, Holger Hoos, Marko Grobelnik, Catelijne Muller, Clara Neppel, Dino Pedreschi, and Cécile Huet.
The HumaneAI project has been successfully extended into the HumanE-AI-Net under the H2020 call topic ICT-48-2020 – Towards a vibrant European network of AI excellence centres which now gives the consortium 3 years to build and exciting new scientific domain.
The HumanE AI Net brings together top European research centers, universities and key industrial champions into a network of centers of excellence that goes beyond a narrow definition of AI and combines world-leading AI competence with key players in related areas such as HCI, cognitive science, social sciences and complexity science.
Responsible Artificial Intelligence, How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way, Dignum, Virginia, Springer (New York – Berlin).
In this book, the Virginia Dignum examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values.
We have shaped a report describing results from an initiative to organize a community of researchers and innovators around a research program that seeks to create AI technologies that empower humans and human society to vastly improve quality of life for all. Read the deliverable.
The HumaneAI team has summarised the ideas and considerations that have emerged in the course of considering various ways to sustain and develop a large-scale Humane AI community in the absence of a Flagship. They are intended as recommendations for the funding bodies of the Union with respect to an efficient implementation of large-scale long-term research initiatives in AI and similar fields. Read the deliverable.
On October 10 and 11 the HumaneAI partners meet in Den Haag to create the Reseach Roadmap for the new science of Human Centric Artificial Intelligence.
The Humane AI 3rd meeting was held on 10-11 October 2019 in Den Haag with all partners attending.
The Humane AI 3rd meeting was held on 10-11 October 2019 in Den Haag with all partners attending.
The Humane AI 3rd meeting was held on 10-11 October 2019 in Den Haag with all partners attending.
The Humane AI 3rd meeting was held on 10-11 October 2019 in Den Haag with all partners attending.
The Humane AI 3rd meeting was held on 10-11 October 2019 in Den Haag with all partners attending.
The Humane AI 3rd meeting was held on 10-11 October 2019 in Den Haag with all partners attending.
The important thing for Europe is to devise AI which is beneficial to people. Which essentially mean two things. Beneficial to individual people and beneficial to our societies as our communities. And this are two very different things. We might be very intelligent smart individual and be very stupid as a crowd. To somehow engineer social technical society which is able to leverage the right network effect that bring us to decide the properties of well-being. Plurally has been democracy. A better place to live. Well to do this we really need to rely on AI, sure. But we need to rely into developing AI which is working with us towards the same objective. We are not only smart as individuals, but we are smartly adopting as an intelligent crowd, reaching common goals all together, making the traffic flow in the city or make democracy work.
What would be your blue sky project in AI for Europe?
If I had a lot of resources, especially beautiful minds for a blue-sky project, I would like to engineer the platform for democracy. The platform that would enable people to be competent and connected to many different views of any controversial issue. To become essentially more able to understand our peers, and be more able to, to become a pluralistic diversity of opinions, able to make the best choice in every possible moment towards all the big challenges that are in front of us, from the climate challenge to the democracy challenge, to the economic and jobs challenge, the inequality challenge. All those require our ability more competent, more connected and more open people. And AI can, Humane AI, can really much help in this direction.
The human AI project is especially interesting for me because of its social aspects as I already said. Most people deal with Human–machine interaction when they are thinking in terms of Artificial Intelligence, that humans are embedded into society. That is a very, very important aspect. We act as social beings. Well–being of the human depends not only on the individual properties but also on how we feel ourselves in the society. And that is very much influenced by AI and it will be more and more influenced as time goes on. This are aspects which we want to explore within this project.
We are looking at problems where AI is able to impose some kind of biases onto the society. I am thinking in terms of recommendation systems, I am thinking in terms of social online networks, which a large impact on the society, it can enhance segregation, fragmentation of the society, which are bad consequences of these algorithms, which are applied. And we are also looking for possible way outs of these traps of the new technology.
What would be your blue sky project in AI for Europe?
AI has a self-development, it is from the point of view of companies of technology, very rapidly developing, technology with fantastic future, but I think if I had the possibility I would put much more emphasize on social aspect, on assuring that the development of AI will not bring us to society which is not compatible with European values. We want to live in a ecosystem where AI and humans have their place, but with the values which we have now about social life.
I think we’ve been doing Human – Centered AI for many years, we’ve always been interested in how we can use technology to empower people, but we’ve been using other technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality. AI offers new challenges to think about how we might think about what humans can do, what machines can do and what they can do together as a synergy. For a long time, we used to think about what humans were good at best and what machines were good at best. I think the challenge now is to think about what humans and machines can do together that they are best at.
What would be your blue sky project in AI for Europe?
Oh, in Europe, for Europe. I am very interested in how we can think not just at the individual, but at the group and society level. How we can make an impact and make big changes to improve society. If we could develop complex decision-making resources, so that we could perhaps once and for all resolve a political debates that keep going on and well we could use, we could have this AI tools that could help us to look through loads and loads of past records and make a more informed decision about someone or something before we decide. I think that is something where we and also data that is accumulating. Something that we could really sort of push towards. That would require lots and lots of machine learning capabilities and Human–computer interaction, people as well as philosophers and ethicists to work together. That is my blue sky research project. Is to think about how we can really make a difference to society by providing them with the way to do more complex decision making in a variety of domains and context.
Well, the thing is like when I look at collaborations with machines and humans there is a huge aspect on how human think and how humans represent actually the way they understand and make sense out of what they’re doing. If we want to have machines that actually work together with humans in this collaboration, then we actually have to respect that the process, that meaning is made and reflection is done in the way we are building this AI structures and the way we’re using machine learning for this purpose. In my work I actually use AI technology from very different fields and apply that, because it made sense in the process and not necessarily as a common way to do it with machine learning.
So, the human AI project, what I understand is very basically human centered AI. If we want to build collaborators that actually make meaningful improvements of the world, meaningful innovations, we have to look in how this can be meaningful for humans. That is kind of where I see, we should focus on what’s meaningful to human and not necessarily for the system. That has certain implications about explainability, how thus systems can explain themselves, how can systems explain its reasoning, because reasoning is important for example if you gather ideas into brainstorming in this case but also about the whole aspect of sense making, semantics that are related to that, especially when we talk about abstract ideas or concepts that we are actually developing. There is a lot of aspects on that. And this whole aspect of learning, what does it actually mean to learn in this context where we actually don’t know where we are going. We do some idea of brainstorming, we don’t know where we go, we learn over the course of actually talking to each other, how is that done in the system and all these aspects are very related on how humans actually understand this process and do it naturally. That doesn’t mean that AI’s has to do the same, but they have to acknowledge and be build towards that.
What would be your blue sky project in AI for Europe?
That’s a good question. I think there is certainly, I see, a need, especially when you talk about collaborative AI, I certainly see a need of integrating for example more psychologists, social scientists in the work, basically, working on how do we actually do collaboration with machines but also within humans. Projects could relate to what is actually grounding, what is actually sense making in human and in human AI interactions, and things like that. Also, kind of like, investing a lot of money on developing new approaches based on for example human behavior. I for example did a lot of design studies, before I start designing system to basically see how humans do it. If we are thinking look at several of these processes, we might actually find patterns that allow us to build better AI and machine learning approaches in this context.
Do you have a one-liner on that?
No. To be honest, no. I think there is so many work to be done on different aspects. On the machine learning side, we have to stop thinking about to have a goal and that’s what I want to ultimate, because the values is in basically developing ourselves to get a machines. Which means developing the human and the machine at the same time, so that we need new approaches there, but we also have to better understand how do we actually think, how do we actually get this information, how do we actually do innovation. Mapping these in interaction actually, is a very more complex that I have a one-liner for that.
