The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Enegineers UK and Ireland Section is pleased to invite you to its traditional Annual Christmas Lecture. This year the Section is honoured to have Dr Marc A. Zissman and Dr Konstantinos Karachalios as keynote speakers and 2020 IEEE president-elect Professor Kathy Land with the opening address.
The event will feature two talks: PACT – Private Automated Contact Tracing for COVID-19 by Dr Marc Zissman (MIT); and Advancing ethical aspects in AI systems and technologies: IEEE's walking the talk by Konstantinos Karachalios.
PACT – Private Automated Contact Tracing for COVID-19 by Dr Marc Zissman (MIT)
PACT is a collaboration led by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes close collaborators from many other public and private research and development centers and is a partnership among cryptographers, physicians, privacy experts, scientists and engineers. Our mission is to maximize the utility of exposure detection functions in personal digital communication devices such that they can enhance and augment existing contact tracing strategies while preserving privacy. In this talk, we will provide a brief background of the COVID-19 pandemic and how automated contact tracing might fit into the overall fight against its spread, we will discuss and assess technical approaches for using smartphone technology to detect contact exposure events while preserving privacy, and we will report on PACT’s impact to date and the road ahead.
Advancing ethical aspects in AI systems and technologies: IEEE's walking the talk by Konstantinos Karachalios
IEEE is a very reputable organization because, since over a century, many of its members have been at the forefront of very significant techno-scientific advances. By contrast, the tagline “advancing technology for humanity” is just 10 years old. The extension "for humanity" is far from trivial, if one admits that the development of technology, and partly also of science, is embedded in broader socio-economic processes. Under realistic circumstances, assuming that these processes would a priori benefit the entire humanity, or at least broader parts thereof, may prove wishful thinking. Logically, science and technology will serve the interests of the ones who determine and control the initial and boundary conditions of the socio-economic processes that drive forward the techno-scientific evolution, such as geopolitical considerations and market competition as well as financial and reputational incentives within the techno-scientific communities. This is probably the reason why as the speed of technological evolution follows a breathtaking exponential trajectory, the technology-caused extinction-level threats to humanity keep increasing, not decreasing.
The speech will address the question whether and how IEEE, through its leadership and membership, recognize these challenges and - if yes - what are the programs and plans aiming at reducing the gap between aspirational declarations and reality, starting with the specific case of AI systems.
