Digital Humanism is at the forefront of current debates concerning human-technology interaction. In March 2022, TU Wien Informatics, the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML), and IWM launched the Digital Humanism Fellowship to foster academic exchange across disciplines and institutional boundaries.
To set the stage, the first part of this presentation covered irresponsible AI: (1) discrimination (e.g., facial recognition, justice); (2) phrenology (e.g., biometric based predictions); (3) limitations (e.g., human incompetence, minimal adversarial AI) and (4) indiscriminate use of computing resources (e.g., large language models). These examples do have a personal bias, but they set the context for the second part, where three main challenges were addressed: (1) principles and governance, (2) regulation, and (3) our cognitive biases. At the end of the talk there was a discussion on responsible AI initiatives and the outlook for the near future.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Professor at the Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence at Northeastern University. He has held various positions in the tech industry, including chief technology officer of NTENT and VP of Research at Yahoo Labs. He founded and led Yahoo Labs in Barcelona and Santiago de Chile and oversaw Yahoo Labs in Haifa and London. Baeza-Yates is also a part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. He has authored or co-authored several publications, including the best-selling Modern Information Retrieval (Addison-Wesley 1999) textbook and the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures (Addison-Wesley 1991). Baeza-Yates has received numerous awards and honors, including being elected to the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM Council. He has also been elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences and the Chilean Academy of Engineering and named an ACM and IEEE Fellow.
Gerti Kappel, Head of the Faculty of Informatics at the TU Vienna, opened the event.
Ludger Hagedorn, IWM Permanent Fellow, outlined the Digital Humanism Fellowship Program.
Hannes Werthner, co-founder of the Digital Humanism initiative and former Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien, introduced the speaker and moderated the ensuing discussion and Q&A.
A recording of the lecture is available below.
