Biographies Artificial Intelligence: Implications

Virgínia Dignum (Umeå University, Sweden)

Virginia Dignum is Professor of Social and Ethical Artificial Intelligence at University of Umeå in Sweden and associated with TU Delft in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the ethical and societal impact of AI. She is a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI), a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, and of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous Systems. In 2006, she received the prestigious Veni grant from NWO (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research) for her work on agent-based organizations. She is a well-known speaker on the social and ethical impact of AI, has published extensively on the topic, and is member of program committees of most major journals and conferences in AI.

Luís Moniz Pereira (FCT-UNL, Portugal)

Luís Moniz Pereira is the Portuguese researcher with most scientific publications and projects relating to artificial intelligence, having studied this subject for over 40 years. A graduate in Electrotechnical Engineering from IST, he took a PhD in Cybernetics at Brunel University (London) in 1974, becoming a research fellow at Edinburgh University and a full professor in Artificial intelligence at UNL in 1980. He also has an honorary doctorate from the University of Dresden.
Considered to be one of the founders of logic programming, he founded and chaired the Portuguese Association for Artificial intelligence. He was awarded the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Science Prize in 1984, the Prémio Boa Esperança in 1994 and the Prémio Estímulo à Ciência in 2005. He is a fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial intelligence and is currently a professor and researcher at the NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics at UNL, now in retirement, and a member of the scientific council of IMDEA-Software, Madrid. He has published hundreds of articles and developed software tools, which are available at http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~lmp, having lectured in AI and cognitive sciences. He has brought 19 researchers to PhD level and was also an international consultant on research projects for Apple, DEC, Westinghouse and the World Health Organisation.
His current research areas are centred on computational reasoning, evolutionary game theory, machine ethics and cognitive sciences.

Manuel Dias (Microsoft, Portugal)

Manuel Dias has over 20 years of experience in technology. He began his career at EFACEC, in an area of research and development linked to real time systems. He then joined OutSystems, where he created and led an area of business solutions, later becoming responsible for the area of Product Management. In 2010, he joined Microsoft Portugal, as Analytics Lead, with responsibility for the area of Data & Artificial Intelligence for the business market. He is currently the manager of Enterprise Technical Sales, which he combines with the role of AI Ambassador for Microsoft in Portugal. In 2018, he was a co-founder and is currently vice-president of Data Science Portuguese Association (DSPA). Since 2015, he has also been a visiting lecturer at NOVA Information Management School(NOVA IMS), lecturing in the Master’s Degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, among other programmes.
Manuel is a graduate in Electrotechnical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and has a Master’s Degree in Information Systems Management from the School of Economics and Management (ISEG), where he wrote his thesis on the mathematical simulation of complex systems.

Sinopses Artificial Intelligence: Implications

DEBATE – may 15, 16:00 – 18:00 – Main Auditorium
Virgínia Dignum (Umeå University, Suécia), Luís Moniz Pereira (FCT-UNL, Portugal), Manuel Dias (Microsoft, Portugal)

Virginia Dignum, Professor Social and Ethical Artificial Intelligence, Umeå University – Department of Computer Science

Responsible Artificial Intelligence

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect users and society, many questions raise across social, economic, political, technological, legal, ethical and philosophical issues. Can machines make moral decisions? Should AI systems ever be treated as ethical entities? What are the legal and ethical consequences of human enhancement technologies, or cyber-genetic technologies? How should moral, societal and legal values be part of the design process? In this talk, I look at ways to ensure ethical behaviour by artificial systems. Given that ethics are dependent on the socio-cultural context and are often only implicit in deliberation processes, methodologies are needed to elicit the values held by designers and stakeholders, and to make these explicit leading to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous systems. I will in particular focus on the ART principles for AI: Accountability, Responsibility, Transparency.

Luís Moniz Pereira, NOVA LINCS Research Centre, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon

We are at a crossroads between artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and their social impacts. In 2016, I published Programming Machine Ethics, a book that made incursions into this terra incognita. In it, I employ the theoretical tools of "Logic Programming" and "Evolutionary Game Theory," and I address two moral realms: the cognitive and the populational.
In this talk, I delve into the topic of Machine Ethics and look at some salient issues for society arising from it. In particular, as far as moral philosophy is concerned, I look at jurisprudence and regulation; the design of autonomous moral agents; the teaching and learning of ethics; ethically safe software and applications.

Manuel Dias, Microsoft Portugal and Data Science Portuguese Association (DSPA) and NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS)

The possibilities of using Artificial Intelligence in support of a better society are limitless. When we think about self-driving cars, intelligent virtual assistants that anticipate our needs, advanced image recognition systems used for our safety and security, or medical diagnoses based on ever more precise machine learning algorithms, we understand how AI will radically change everyone’s life.
However, despite the enormous potential of this technology, new questions are emerging, mainly related to the implications of an accelerated use of AI, whether in the field of ethics, data privacy or the fairness of algorithms. Only the answer to these questions will enable us to adopt a global system that is capable of achieving the prime objective, namely to improve human life. Innovation in fields such as health, education or the sustainability of our planet are examples where technological development allied to a broader dialogue extended to civil society, academia and government, will be able to bring exponential results aligned with a vision of AI centred on the human being.

Artificial Intelligence: Applications, Implications and Speculations

Artificial intelligence is increasingly imposing itself on the reality of contemporary societies, although new technological developments come into being every day, this phenomenon is not correspondingly reflected in the public sphere. Considering that it is important to know and discuss this reality, this cycle of debates takes a look at the current applications of artificial intelligence reflecting upon its social implications in a whole range of different areas (ranging from health to privacy, employability and other areas) and the way in which the
future can be imagined within this new paradigm.

Between April and June, the cycle is divided into three separate moments, each of them a double programme: a debate with several speakers from the academic and business worlds and a conference.