Bernardo Magnini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

We are working on specific aspects Human – Centered AI, particular how the interaction between machine and the human can foster this vision of AI for human. We think that without clearly understanding of natural languages there cannot be a real interaction between machines and humans. Working in this direction is not only useful, it is necessary.

We would like to build, as I said, machines that are able to properly interact with humans. There is a long way in this direction and we are discussing in these days about next steps for this vision. Particularly, we are interested in several aspects. First of all, multilinguality. Europe is made of countries with several languages, we don’t want that there is just one language which is the reference, we want to push a research and technology for all the languages. This opens big issues, because not all languages have the same number of speakers, not each language is equally important, but we think that language is really necessary in order to preserve cultural aspects of each country and each community.

The blue sky project is a machine able to interact, to conversate on several issues without being too much forced on a specific domain on a specific language, trying to mirror as much as possible what humans do among them.

Luis Leiva, Aalto University

I believe as a concept, conceptually that as picking these projects is framing how users can be modeled, how the context can be modeled, how can society benefit from all the breakthrough research of this projects on the society. So far what I like the most is the framing of the projects in terms of how interaction is being considered, how the symbolic and the modern machine learning techniques are breaching together and how the ethics and transparency are being considered.

I think one of the biggest challenges is understanding the users their context. If I would have unlimited resources I would try to contribute to moral in the context. Because it is very dynamic, is very challenging and it’s a one of the long term research challenges currently going on.

Franco Turini, University in Pisa

What is your opinion on Human – Centered AI?

Basically, what I think is most important is the possibility of using AI in a way that is understandable for the people. Most of the risk we have now AI systems are trained using data we do not own that are collected by Google or other. That is the other problem, I mean it can be pleasant when you connect to the web, the kind of commercials you get are designed for yourself, but when for example it has to do with voting, I don’t think it is much fair for humans. Democratizing AI should be one of the goal of our projects.

What would be your blue sky project in AI for Europe?

Well essentially, I repeat myself democratizing the use of AI tools, which means, make them understandable, usable and having the basic data owned by the people itself, I mean accessible by the people itself. So it would be a project involving both computer science, but also ethics, also philosophers, also politicians, essentially, who I am not sure so far understand very well what’s going on.

Victor Paléologue, Sorbonne Université

What is your opinion on Human  – Centered AI?

It is really important that it is Human – centered, just because robots are only tools, it is not meant to be anything else. It is meant just to do what you want of it, you have to keep in control with your devices, would be your computer, your cellphone, your robot, it’s the same, you have to be in power with it. It has to be centered to help you personally. Its inevitable, otherwise that’s pointless to robotics. Stalking the future, we can imagine if a robot can understand whatever happens in your home, that you can tell about it, lets say about the furniture is there, about the rooms, about the people living in there and you can make everything together, lets say okay, make some meal and prepare something for the dinner for this person who will come home tonight or whatever, it is really the ideal of a robot that you can do whatever you want with it. It really needs to understand the world in which it is and just trying to make the human able to teach the robot, just this is a step towards that. In the end, the robot if it understands so much it can do whatever you like of it, like the sci-fi movies, you know. I don’t think its science fiction, its not working yet, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t happen really. Technologies are there and we are working towards that, it’s a long road, but I am pretty sure we are going to do it.

Paul Lukowicz, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

We have reached a stage where AI is a technology that impacts virtually every section of our lives. It controls things it tells us how to do things and what to do things. I think a lot of us realised now that we really need to make sure that the technology helps us and empowers us people and doesn’t enslave us and deprive us of our autonomy and our ability to think and essentially Humane AI is a project that tries to solve the fundamental scientific questions behind that and that’s really important. Because you cannot just pedigree decide that AI has to be good for humans, you have to solve the technology that is needed to actually make AI such.

My blue sky project would be developing blue sky technology that could at a certain stage interact with humans in a social context in such a way that people would accept it as an equal and helpful partner.