Dino Pedreschi, University in Pisa

What is your opinion on Human – Centered AI?

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.

János Kertész, Central European University

What is your opinion on Human – Centered AI?

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.