Talk "Ethical Challenges in AI"

The talk by Ricardo Baeza-Yates will take place on Friday, 25 March from 11 am to 1 pm, face-to-face in Sala d’Actes at the Vèrtex building as well as online via Google Meet. English will be the language of the talk. To attend it is necessary to register.

During the first part of the talk, Ricardo Baeza-Yates will discuss five current specific challenges using examples such as discrimination (facial recognition, justice, sharing economies, and language models), phrenology as a biomedical-based preconditions, unfair digital commerce, stupid models and indiscriminate use of computing resources.
These examples do perform a personal bias but set the context in which he addresses four generic challenges such as too many principles (principles vs. techniques), cultural differences, regulation and our cognitive biases.
To conclude the talk, we will discuss what we can do to address these challenges in the near future.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, professor and research director at Northeastern University's Institute for Experiential AI in Sillicon Valley (United States), specializes in algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, and searching and mining of web data. Additionally, he is a doctor of computer science at the University of Chile and at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), in Barcelona. Furthermore, he is an assistant professor at the Department of Computation at the University of Waterloo, in Canada.

The Ethics Committee organizes this event. UPC has positioned itself among the leading universities in Europe when it comes to opening the debate on humanism and technology and is trying to bring forward the benefits of establishing sound ethical criteria and human values for technologies, along with involving administrations, other universities and companies.

UPC Ethics Comittee