artificial intelligence

Experts discussed challenges posed by developments brought on by artificial intelligence

The Hot Topic was coordinated and moderated by Christoph Drösser, who holds a diploma in mathematics and was a longtime science editor and reporter for Die Zeit, Germany’s major weekly paper.

Summary

Artificial Intelligence has established itself at the forefront of technological innovation. That is precisely why AI was the focus of the Hot Topic at the 4th HLF in 2016: “AI: From Lofty Dream to Technology Driver.” The session was comprised of a panel discussion with leading researchers who debated the current scientific trends in AI and its applications, followed by a broader discussion that dove into how the developments in AI affect our lives and society.
AI is no longer a brash, cryptic concept taken directly from the pages of science fiction. Instead, the developments owed to the technology based on AI have altered what we thought possible and have done so in a much quicker fashion than predicted. A focal point of the session was Deep Learning and the capabilities of these neural networks. It has taken decades for technology to catch up with the concept, and now networks are amassing data in amounts that were simply inconceivable before.  
The power behind these advancements is very evident with self-driving cars or our internet activity being profiled by algorithms, which insights ethical questions. The influence that AI has already had and will continue to impose on our future can be the source of energetic and impassioned debates.  

Panelists

• Thomas Dreier is the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). His research fields are legal aspects of the information society and of new technologies as well as copyright law.
• Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the ETH in Zurich. He works on modeling social processes with mathematical means and is one of the signatories of the “Digital Manifesto” in which several German scientists have expressed their concerns about the social applications of modern digital technologies.
• Jim Hendler is Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the state of New York. He will give an introduction into current AI technologies.
• Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) won the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1994. He was the founding director of CMU’s robotics lab, and his latest research centers around “Technology in Service of Society”.
• Holger Schwenk is a research scientist at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research Paris. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paris 6 in 1996 and prior to joining Facebook in 2015, he was a professor for computer science at the University of Le Mans, where he led a large group on statistical machine translation.
• Noel Sharkey, an Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, chairs the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and is a co-founder of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics.