purplecat

The workshop last week included a poster session and, as is the way of these things, one can't always get to speak to all the poster presenters one would like to. This one had included handy references and QR codes so I just snapped the poster and moved on - now need to decide which papers to add to the large virtual "to read" pile.

Today was full of talks. The theme of the workshop is Normative Reasoning for AI, but some of the talks seemed more like logic (or theorem proving) theory talks - perhaps that is a natural consequence of mixing communities. I'm talking tomorrow morning on the UK Highway Code - I do so because the organiser suggested it, but he's now denying responsibility and says he's happy for me to talk about verifying machine ethics if I want to. This is tempting. I have a much more solid body of work on machine ethics than I do on the Highway Code. On the other hand the Highway Code talk is now written and cheese is being served in 10 minutes - so if I start writing a talk on machine ethics I will miss out on cheese. There are gaps in the schedule, so I will tell the room tomorrow morning that I could give a "lightening talk" on machine ethics if they really want one, and then the assembled worthies can decide.

I spent most of Wednesday at a Northern Powerhouse Mini-conference on the relationship between artificial intelligence and inclusive growth. The morning was spent on a certain amount of "what is AI?" but with a good deal of discussion of the pitfalls of algorithmic bias and so on.

In the afternoon we had a presentation from Simon Reid, Sector Lead for Manufacturing for LCR 4.0 (Liverpool City Regions Industry 4.0 thing) which included ciivsoft as a case study for the good work LCR4.0 has been doing in the AI space. Ciivsoft is an automated recruiting tool which, among other things, builds "personality profiles" for you from people's applications and scours their social media presence for further information. No risk for algorithmic bias there then. One of our senior retired Computer Science professors immediately piped up once the talk had ended to ask why the ethics of this was so side-lined. The question was not answered. Indeed it was barely acknowledged. In fact the conversation moved on to how to encourage more young kids in the Liverpool region to be "the next Mark Zuckerberg"

While I agree with the sentiment here. There is a desperate need to stimulate aspiration in certain Liverpool City Region areas, but Zuckerberg seemed like a particularly tone deaf example to select when there had just been so much talk about the potential problems arising from the deployment of AI (and Big Data and social media) and how the region might seek to harness the potential of these technologies without entrenching its existing problems.

Which I blog about here.