Davor Orlic | Humane AI

April 12, 2019

Blog

James Crowley, Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble

If you look at where money comes from, what drives AI. In America AI is for profit. Google, Amazon, Apple, all these companies are looking to make money. This has led to some perverse effects of the technology taking over from people. If you look in China, right now where the real innovation is, China looks at AI for control, this leads to a ubiquitous vision of what everybody is doing everywhere and an incredible tool for controlling people and it AI for humanity. Our vision is to offer an alternative to AI and AI for money and AI for control. an alternative vision for AI for humanity. We want to make AI that will empower humans, to give them new powers, new abilities, to improve their quality of life and not to replace them.

AI for humanity opens many interesting blue sky projects. My current challenge is to build systems that collaborate and understand people as individuals. That understand what they understand, to see what they see and to see what they don’t see, so that they can offer advice, assistance and services to help them be more effective. These are what we call collaborative intelligent systems.

April 11, 2019

News

HumaneAI project becomes reality

The Humane AI kick-off meeting was held on 11 April 2019 at the CINIQ center in Berlin with all partners attending.

Humane AI, with project number 761758, is funded under the topic “FET FLAGSHIPS – Tackling grand interdisciplinary science and technology challenges” of European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

The focus is on human-centered AI, with a strong emphasis on ethics, values by design, and appropriate consideration of related legal and social issues. The HumanE AI project will mobilize a research landscape far beyond the direct project funding and create a unique innovation ecosystem that offers substantial return on investment. It will result in significant disruption across its socio-economic impact areas, including Industry 4.0, health & well-being, mobility, education, policy and finance. It will spearhead the efforts required to help Europe achieve a step-change in AI uptake across the economy.

The consortium with 35 partners from 17 countries, including four large industrial members, has defined further steps to implement a full research agenda in Human oriented AI and a strategy to mobilize major scientific, industrial, political and public support for this vision.

The Humane AI kick-off meeting was held on 11 April 2019 at the CINIQ center in Berlin with all partners attending.

April 11, 2019

Blog

Davor Orlic, Knowledge 4 All Foundation

The idea of a human approach to AI seems to be at the center of gravity in Europe. It’s an interesting idea and the room supports it, but there is also this question of who is involved, policy makers, researchers, politicians. We will probably want to look at the choices we have. AI for cyber security, AI for the military versus AI for taxpayers and the general public and the citizens of Europe.

My bluesky project would be to connect all of the machine learning communities across the world into one, a sorts of “machine learners of the world unite” approach. This would mean to build on value but also to protect themselves from other players and paly with other players, such as policy makers, etc. A global south, a global north and a global network.

April 10, 2019

Blog

Michael Klein, VU University Amsterdam

like very much this idea of the Humane AI project because I think technology is never on its own, and especially this is not the case for AI technology, so its always happening in interaction with humans. Within Humane AI we are trying to see how we can study what is happening when people are using AI technology. That’s really relevant. I have heard a really nice summary today when somebody said that the US are doing AI for money, China is doing AI for control and we in Europe are doing AI for humanity. I think that’s very important. We want to achieve something with AI that is good for humanity.

My own research is about understanding human behaviour. There is a lot of knowledge about why people do what they do in psychology, sociology and we also have a lot of technical measures to work on that. I would like to have an integrated framework where we combine all the knowledge and technologies that we have to understand what people are doing and why, that’s my bluesky project for AI.

April 9, 2019

Blog

Virginia Dignum, Umeå University

Humane AI is about people and AI, about developing AI systems in a way that they are fundamentally inserted in our societies in a way that it understands and respects our values and works with us for augmenting capacities to making our life’s better and to make society a better place for all.

My bluesky project in AI is about designing optimal AI, meaning that AI is optimal for people and that is trustworthy, ethical, responsible and will take accountability and transparency into account. The question is how to develop computational tools to implement all these ideas into these AI systems.

April 8, 2019

News

European Communication to Member States fits the vision of HumaneAI

The Commission published a European strategy in AI in April 2018. The strategy places people at the centre of the development of AI — human-centric AI. It is a three-pronged approach to boost the EU’s technological and industrial capacity and AI uptake across the economy, prepare for socio-economic changes, and ensure an appropriate ethical and legal framework.

To deliver on the AI strategy, the Commission developed together with Member States a coordinated plan on AI, which it presented in December 2018, to create synergies, pool data — the raw material for many AI applications — and increase joint investments.

The aim is to foster cross-border cooperation and mobilise all players to increase public and private investments to at least EUR 20 billion annually over the next decade.

The Commission doubled its investments in AI in Horizon 2020 and plans to invest EUR 1 billion annually from Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe Programme, in support notably of common data spaces in health, transport and manufacturing, and large experimentation facilities such as smart hospitals and infrastructures for automated vehicles and a strategic research agenda.

April 8, 2019

News

European Commission supports a vision of Human Centered artificial intelligence

The Commission presented on 8 April 2019 next steps for building trust in artificial intelligence by taking forward the work of the High-Level Expert Group.

Building on the work of the group of independent experts appointed in June 2018, the Commission is launching a pilot phase to ensure that the ethical guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI) development and use can be implemented in practice. The Commission invites industry, research institutes and public authorities to test the detailed assessment list drafted by the High-Level Expert Group, which complements the guidelines.

April 8, 2019

Blog

Holger Hoos, Leiden University

In AI people are understandably pretty concerned about the fact that there might be adverse effects to their jobs, lives, they don’t really understand the technology very well, but they see that it brings big changes. People want to be reassured, and to be honest, I want to be reassured too, that AI is going to happen in a way that is socially compatible and that it makes our lives better, rather than just different, and maybe worse. Humane AI really aims at having a kind of AI that makes people’s lives better, rather than having than having the kind of AI that makes more profit. It’s very important for Humane AI to look very carefully at people’s needs, limitations, that maybe with the help of AI we can help overcome, like implicit bias for example. It’s also very important to help balance the interest of society as a whole, individuals and industry as we go and deploy AI broadly.

Bluesky project: I think the biggest problem we are facing right now is the critical shortage of expertise in AI and one of the things that needs to be done in order to change is of course to train more AI experts, but that is going to be too slow and will not fill the demand. Therefore, in my research what I would really like to do is automate to a large extent the development, customisation and deployment and running of AI. I think that will make sure that certain minimum standards in the quality of AI systems will be met much more easily. Automated AI would go all the way to making it easy for people that know the job that needs to be done, to allow them to do that job better with AI.