IFIP President Mike Hinchey joins a stellar line-up of speakers for the first United Nations ITU / XPRIZE AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva from 7-9 June 2017.

The Summit aims to accelerate the development and democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to address global challenges such as poverty, hunger, health, education, equality and the protection of our environment.

Organized by ITU and the XPRIZE Foundation – in partnership with UN agencies including OHCHR, UNESCO, UNICEF,UNICRIUNIDOUNITAR and UN Global Pulse – the summit will evaluate the opportunities presented by AI with a view to ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity. 

Professor Hinchey, an invited plenary speaker, is also featured in last week’s United Nations ITU Magazine special edition on the Summit with a by-lined article entitled: “AI and Ethics – where to draw the line?”

“As President of IFIP, the global federation of information and communication technology (ICT) professional societies, I’m conscious that the work our members and others engage in to program these systems is critical to their performance and their trustworthiness,” Hinchey said. He is one of several speakers who offer tangible guidance on the tenets of responsible AI development from the perspectives of technology, ethics, standardization and policy. 

ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao said ITU aims to guide AI innovation towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. “As the UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies, we are providing a neutral platform for international dialogue to build a common understanding of the capabilities of emerging AI technologies,” he said.

XPRIZE CEO, Marcus Shingle, said AI is increasingly playing a significant role in many of their active competitions. “We are seeing teams use AI as an underlying tool across a variety of domains, from creating personalized learning experiences for children with no access to formal education in Tanzania, to empowering consumers to make healthcare decisions with a medical Tricorder device, to guiding advanced and autonomous robotic vehicles to explore the deep sea or to find their way to the lunar surface,” he said. “With the acceleration and democratization of AI, we recognize the tremendous opportunity for an emerging generation of problem solvers to tackle global challenges.” 

The AI for Good Summit, the first of a series of annual conferences on AI, will convene representatives of government, industry, UN agencies, civil society and the AI research community to explore the latest developments in AI and their implications for regulation, ethics and security and privacy. Breakout sessions will invite participants to collaborate and propose strategies for the development of AI applications and systems to promote sustainable living, reduce poverty and deliver citizen-centric public services.

In addition to Professor Hinchey, other confirmed speakers include:

  • Yoshua Bengio, Head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms
  • Pedro Domingos, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington
  • Vicki Hanson, President of ACM, and Distinguished Professor of Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft AI and Research
  • Fei-Fei Li, Director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud
  • Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University
  • Michael Møller, Director General of United Nations Office at Geneva
  • Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google
  • Yin Qi, Founder and CEO of Megvii (Face++)
  • Francesca Rossi, Research Scientist, IBM Watson, and Professor of Computer Science, University of Padova
  • Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, at University of Oxford
  • Jürgen Schmidhuber, Scientific Director, Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA; Professor of AI, USI & SUPSI, Switzerland; President, NNAISENSE
  • Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International
  • Rupert Stadler, Chairman of the Board of Management of AUDI
  • Manuela Veloso, Herbert A. Simon University Professor, Head of the Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, researcher in AI, robotics, and machine learning, and former President of AAAI
  • Jing Wang, Senior Vice President and Head of Research at Baidu

For more information, visit the AI for Good Global Summit.