Aims and Focus

Problems of cooperation—in which agents seek ways to jointly improve their welfare—are ubiquitous and important. They can be found at all scales ranging from our daily routines—such as highway driving, communication via shared language, division of labor, and work collaborations—to our global challenges—such as disarmament, climate change, global commerce, and pandemic preparedness. Arguably, the success of the human species is rooted in our ability to cooperate, in our social intelligence and skills. Since machines powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing an ever greater role in our lives, it will be important to equip them with the skills necessary to cooperate and to foster cooperation.

We see an opportunity for the field of AI, and particularly machine learning, to explicitly focus effort on this class of problems which we term Cooperative AI. The goal of this research would be to study the many aspects of the problem of cooperation, and innovate in AI to contribute to solving these problems. Central questions include how to build machine agents with the capabilities needed for cooperation, and how advances in machine learning can help foster cooperation in populations of agents (of machines and/or humans), such as through improved mechanism design and mediation.

Such research could be organized around key capabilities necessary for cooperation, including: understanding other agents, communicating with other agents, constructing cooperative commitments, and devising and negotiating suitable bargains and institutions. In the context of machine learning, it will be important to develop training environments, tasks, and domains in which cooperative skills are crucial to success, learnable, and non-trivial. Work on the fundamental question of cooperation is by necessity interdisciplinary and will draw on a range of fields, including reinforcement learning (and inverse RL), multi-agent systems, game theory, mechanism design, social choice, language learning, and interpretability. This research may even touch upon fields like trusted hardware design and cryptography to address problems in commitment and communication.

Since artificial agents will often act on behalf of particular humans and in ways that are consequential for humans, this research will need to consider how machines can adequately learn human preferences, and how best to integrate human norms and ethics into cooperative arrangements. Research should also study the potential downsides of cooperative skills—such as exclusion, collusion, and coercion—and how to channel cooperative skills to most improve human welfare. Overall, this research would connect machine learning research to the broader scientific enterprise, in the natural sciences and social sciences, studying the problem of cooperation, and to the broader social effort to solve coordination problems.

We are planning to bring together scholars from diverse backgrounds to discuss how AI research can contribute to the field of cooperation.

Key Dates

  • Paper Submission Deadline: October 02, 2020 (Midnight Pacific Time)

  • Final Decisions: October 30, 2020

  • Workshop: December 12, 2020

About

How can access to data in low resource languages be strengthened? What policy measures can strengthen AI-driven innovation for reinforcing multilingualism online? The session will present projects from Africa and Asia on developing and using datasets in low-resource languages to strengthen access to information. It will be the springboard for the launch of the Open for Good Alliance by UNESCO, GIZ, IDRC, Mozilla Foundation among other founding partners.

Description

The ability to deal with human language is an essential attribute in all information and communication technologies. Although there are currently more than 7000 spoken languages, less than 100 of these are flourishing in the digital world with advanced language understanding and spoken language communication technologies.

In the case of low resource, minor and endangered languages, there is a recognised need to develop solutions which ensure these languages still have a place on the Internet. Particularly, there remain gaps in terms of access to data for training statistical machine learning systems which could be leveraged for developing downstream applications. Such applications could provide for the digital inclusion of speakers of low resource language and hence their active participation in knowledge societies.

The UNESCO publication “Steering AI and Advanced ICTs for Knowledge Societies”, launched at IGF 2019, identified “strengthening cooperation between civil society and research institutes for solving problems facing local communities, for novel data collection models based on citizen science that can create data sets for AI that respect international norms for privacy and data protection” as an option for action to address the gaps in the availability of data for development and use of AI in endangered African languages (Hu, et al. 2019).

This workshop is proposed as a follow-up to the above recommendation and will extend beyond the focus on Africa to encompass a broader discussion on the impact of the Internet and technology on endangered languages.

The workshop would enable North-South and North-South-South collaboration at the IGF 2020 and would develop networks and agenda for the workstream on AI, Data and Languages for IGF in Addis Ababa. It will further provide useful inputs for the International Year of Indigenous Language (2022-2032)

Issues

This workshop will highlight the following issues:

  1. Digital language endangerment
  2. The catalytic boost in the process of language extinction due to the Internet
  3. The digital presence of endangered languages
  4. The low availability of resources for the development of technical solutions
  5. The lack of existing benchmarks and research in the development of digital solutions.

Additionally, this workshop will explore the following opportunities:

  1. The use of machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to combat language endangerment.
  2. The use of open source technology to combat language endangerment.

Policy Question(s)

The workshop seeks to address the following key questions:

  1. Can the Internet be used to revitalize minority, indigenous and endangered languages?
  2. How can Machine Learning and AI improve the availability of minority, indigenous and endangered languages datasets?
  3. What kind of policy frameworks can enable further actions on strengthening minority, indigenous and endangered languages on strengthening multilingualism in underserved regions?
  4. How can stakeholders best raise awareness of the issue of endangered and data-poor languages?

Expected Outcomes

  1. A greater understanding of stakeholder and youth specific roles in digital safeguarding of endangered languages
  2. Outline strategies for next phase of dataset development in endangered languages, particularly in Africa.
  3. Agenda for policy advocacy for language technologies and dataset development as part of International Decade for Indigenous Languages to be launched in 2022.
  4. A framework for North-South and North-South-South

Relevance to Internet Governance

Part of the importance of Internet Governance is how it evaluates the consequences of the Internets rapid raise. Language endangerment should be seen as one such consequence.

As set out in the  Los Pinos Declaration on the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032); which called for the design and access to sustainable, accessible, workable and affordable language technologies. Both UNESCO’s 2003 Recommendation concerning Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace and the 2020 Los Pinos Declaration on the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032), recognize the potential of digital technologies in supporting the use and preservation of low or under resourced languages.

This workshop will analyse the work needed to right the wrong created by the Internet, by focusing on the technologies and policy settings needed to revitalise endangered languages. For example, UNESCO’s International Conference Language Technologies for All (LT4All): Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide, organized in December 2019, underlined efforts to develop spelling/grammar checkers up to speech and speaker recognition, machine translation for text and audio, speech synthesis, and spoken dialogue among others as important areas for enabling linguistic diversity and multilingualism.

This workshop will also highlight the work remaining to extend these technologies to under-resourced languages. This situation puts the users of many languages – a vast majority of Indigenous languages – in a disadvantageous situation, creating a digital divide, and placing their languages in danger of digital extinction, if not complete extinction. This work will require a multistakeholder effort – further linking this workshop into Internet Governance.

Relevance to Theme

The proposed session is related to the selected thematic track of “Digital Inclusion.” Frequently, as the Internet has very little or nothing to offer in the marginalized and endangered languages, and indeed oppresses them, these language groups lack the digital presence as they are underserved and suppressed.

Particularly in Africa, UNESCO has been vocal about the need for enhancements in language resources to enable technology solutions which can assist people limited by their language to interact in cyberspace. A salient example, in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, is how investment in open solutions for language technologies could lead to long term capacity enhancement to respond in public health crises is in the form of text analysis methods can be used to pre-warn health authorities of the outbreak (Tsvetkov 2017). For instance, social media posts in endangered languages could be analysed for outbreak of flu. This capacity simply does not exist at the moment – which is an issue this workshop seeks to address.

Discussion Facilitation

Beyond the presentations by the speakers, this workshop will include a large open floor component, where participants can raise questions and comments with the speakers and with other participants.

The moderator will seek to garner participation from a wide variety of attendees – with a particular focus on those from underrepresented regions and demographics, such as the Global South and youth respectively.

During the discussion time allocated in the latter half of the session, discussion will be guided by the aforementioned policy questions, and by the earlier presentations by the speakers.

The organisers anticipate that representatives from the following stakeholders will be in attendance:

  1. AI for Development Network – Africa
  2. Data Science for Social Impact – University of Pretoria Research Group
  3. Data Science Nigeria
  4. Masakhane – Machine Translation for African Languages
  5. Deep Learning Indaba – African Machine Learning Conference
  6. UNESCO Chair in Data Science and Analytics, University of Essex, United Kingdom
  7. UNESCO Chair in Artificial Intelligence, University College London, UK
  8. UNESCO Category 2 Centre – International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI), Slovenia
  9. African Academy of Languages
  10. GIZ, Germany
  11. IDRC, Canada (TBC)
  12. Universal Labelling Project, USA (TBC)
  13. European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (TBC)
  14. Open for Good Alliance

SDGs

GOAL 4: Quality Education
GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
GOAL 10: Reduced Inequalities
GOAL 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
GOAL 17: Partnerships for the Goals

Speakers

Speaker 1: Dr. Joyce Nabende, Makerere University, Uganda, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Kathleen Siminyu, AI4D Network Africa, Kenya, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 3: Roy Boney Jr., Cherokee Language Program, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Subhashish Panigrahi, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group

Organisers

Organizer 1: Bhanu Neupane, UNESCO
Organizer 2: Irmgarda Kasinskaite, UNESCO
Organizer 3: Prateek Sibal, UNESCO
Organizer 4: Philipp Olbrich, GIZ
Organizer 5: Naeem Uddin, Torwali Research Forum
Organizer 6: Jaewon Son, Korea Internet Governance Alliance
Organizer 7: Elliott Mann, Swinburne Law School

Speaker 1: Dorothy Gordon, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Philipp Olbrich, Government, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

As part of the AfricaNLP - Unlocking Local Languages workshop, we were privileged to host a number of projects working in AI in Africa for Development, funded via IDRC grants.

Programme

12:00-12:10 A Computer vision Tomato Pest Assessment and Prediction tool (slides)
  • Denis Pastory Rubanga
12:10-12:15 Using Artificial Intelligence to Digitize Parliamentary Bills in Sub-Saharan Africa (slides)
  • Adewale Akinfaderin
12:15‑12:20 A Semi-Automatic Tool for Meta-data extraction from Malawi Court Judgments (slides)
  • Amelia Taylor
12:20‑12:25

Improving the Pharmacovigilance system using Natural Language Processing (NLP) on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) (slides)

  • Steven Edward
12:25-12:30 Effective Creation of Ground Truth Data-set for Malaria Diagnosis Using Deep Learning (slides)
  • Martha Shaka
12:30-12:40 Early detection of preeclampsia (slides)
  • Moses Thiga
12:40‑12:50 Preservation of Indigenous Languages
  • T. Idriss Tinto
12:50‑13:00 End-to-End Learning for Autonomous Driving on Unpaved Roads - A Study Towards Automated Wildlife Patrol (slides)
  • Khushal Brahmbhatt
13:00‑13:05 Building a Medicinal Plant Database for Preserving Ethnopharmacological Knowledge in the Sahel
  • T. Idriss Tinto
13:05‑13:10

Arabic Speech-to-MSL Translator: ‘Learning for Deaf’ (slides)

  • Abdelhak Mahmoudi
13:10‑13:50 Discussion with AI4D projects
  • Speakers: Davor [Moderator], Denis Pastory Rubanga, Adewale Akinfaderin, Amelia Taylor, Steven Edward, Martha Shaka, Moses Thiga, T. Idriss Tinto, Khushal Brahmbhatt, T. Idriss Tinto,

The rise in ML community efforts on the African continent has led to a growing interest in Natural Language Processing, particularly for African languages which are typically low resource languages.

This interest is manifesting in the form of national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts to build corpora, as well as the application of the aggregated corpora to various NLP tasks.

  1. This workshop therefore has several aims;
    to showcase this work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low resource languages
  2. to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration
  3. to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions, and begin interacting with the wider NLP community
  4. to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talks

About

Strategically, it is believed that in the long-term micro-credentials will become a major pillar of university service, alongside teaching of degrees and research. In quantitative terms, we expect to see a steady linear growth curve in the number of certified micro-credentials, with a shape similar to that of the growth in MOOCs.

MicroHE aims to provide the most comprehensive policy analysis yet conducted of the impact of modularisation, unbundling and micro-credentialing in European Higher Education, and will address the challenges described above by:

  1. Gathering the state of the art in micro-credentialing in European Higher Education today, by organizing the first European survey on micro-credentials in HE, surveying at least 70 institutions across the continent, with the aim of understanding the current level of provision, the types of micro-credentials offered and future trends in provision of micro-credentials
  2. Forecasting the impacts of continued modularisation of Higher Education on HE Institutions by using forward-scanning techniques, specifically through the use of DELPHI methodology
  3. Examining the adequacy of European recognition instruments for micro-credentials, in particular ECTS, the diploma supplement and qualification frameworks
  4. Proposing a ‘credit supplement’ to give detailed information about micro-credentials in a way compatible with ECTS, the diploma supplement and qualification frameworks
  5. Proposing a meta-data standard and developing an online clearinghouse to facilitate recognition, transfer and portability of micro-credentials in Europe.

National workshop purpose

  1. Communicate to the relevant policy makers and stake-holders the road towards making the above vision of an online clearinghouse of a trustworthy, transparent European brand of credentials a reality.
  2. Get feedback from relevant players on how the project vision and especially the online clearinghouse should be refined and improved to be best aligned with European policy goals.
  3. Define a way forward to ensure that the vision gets implemented and contributes to Europe’s educational stakeholders’ long term competitiveness on the world stage and to maintaining and disseminating core European values.
  4. Send a strong public message about the commitment of all involved to take all the steps necessary to ensure a strong positive impact of policy-designed technology on European Education area and economy and society.

Three parts event

  1. A discussion breakfast with a small group of key players focused on initial discussions and networking.
  2. A half-day plenary session with presentations from the project and invited outside speakers from research and policy.
  3. A screening session where a small group of enablers will discuss and plan the next steps for the clearinghouse vision

Programme

09:30-09:45 Introduction: Mihajela Crnko, Jozef Stefan Institute
  • Working breakfast
09:45‑11:30 Moderator: Klemen Šubic, NAKVIS
Presentations:
11:30‑12:00 Moderator: Klemen Šubic, Slovenian Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education
  • Roadmap drafting, screening and feedback sprint

Materials

Additional materials

Gallery

 

About this Event

UCL Technology Society is proud to host the AI For The Common Good Hackathon sponsored by Microsoft, in partnership with UCL Computer Science, X5GON, United Nations ANCSSC, British Embassy Paris, and the UK Science and Innovation Network. Over the 2 days, you will be in teams of 3 and your team will be challenged to build an app or other implementation of an idea that creatively uses AI techniques and other technologies to tackle one or more of the 17 United Nations Sustainability Goals. At this event you will have unprecedented access to major companies with recruiting interest (Microsoft, Cisco, NTT Data, IBM, and the NHS), the United Nations and charity organisations, and a chance to win a range of highly attractive prizes.

Grand Prize

The 3 teams with the best hacks will win a fully sponsored 2 day trip to Paris to present their hack to a wider audience including the UN and a range of major companies and charity organisations. This trip includes a banquet dinner with the British Embassy and a second exclusive hackathon in Paris with other top international universities to further develop the hack.

Secondary Prizes

Microsoft Xbox One's, Oculus and more!

Important Details

  • To stay updated on this event, follow the UCL Technology Society Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/UCLTechSoc/ and join our mailing list by registering as a UCL Technology Society member at http://studentsunionucl.org/clubs-societies/technology-society
  • There are only 200 spots for this hackathon, so make sure you get your FREE ticket now! We will be checking tickets at the event.
  • All hacks will be open-source. By attending this hackathon, you agree for your hack to be shared with X5GON, and the event's partner companies and organisations.

Programme

Event Day 1
09:00-11:00 Launch lecture, guest speakers, X5GON API, Introduction and Review of Current Designs

Lecture Theatre C03, 2 Bedford Way

09:00-17:00 Hack Meetups and Networking

UCL Main Building - Wilkins South Cloister

12:00‑13:00 Lunch
11:00‑12:30 Lab Hack 1 with industry and X5GON
12:30‑14:00 Afternoon snacks
Event Day 2
09:00-17:00 Hack Meetups and Networking

UCL Main Building - Wilkins South Cloister

09:00-11:00 Lab Hack 2 with industry and X5GON
13:00-14:00 Lunch
16:00-17:00 Closing prize-giving session and guest speakers

UCL LAWS - Denys Lecture Theatre, SB31 Bentham

Sponsors

AI for the Common Good: F’AI’R Education Hackathon

About

K4A supported travel grants for the participants a UNESCO organized workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Fairness at the Deep Learning Indaba 2019, the annual gathering of the African Machine Learning Community at Kenyatta University in Kenya. The workshop advocated for human Rights centered, Open, Accessible and Multistakeholder driven development of artificial intelligence as outlined in its study “Steering AI for Knowledge Society: A ROAM Perspective”. The workshop brought together experts in the domains of law, gender, AI, ICTs and community development from within Africa to present their insights and exchange ideas with AI researchers and students at the Indaba.

Speakers

Teki Akuetteh Falconer, Lawyer and Executive Director of Africa Digital Rights’ Hub, speaking on Fairness, Transparency & Data Protection as Building Blocks to human-centric Artificial Intelligence Systems; underlined that waiting for law to catch up with technology has proved to be ineffective due to the rapid pace of change in technology. She therefore stressed the need to incorporate human rights concerns from the design stage for AI, as the relationship between AI and people is a symbiotic one. She further stressed “privacy  is the essence of who I am” and therefore if AI systems are built to enhance human life, it is only imperative   that privacy protection is built-in different products and services to ensure trust, fairness, transparency and safety of all.

Grace Mutung'u showed how data collection processes, including in national censuses and Digital ID projects are not gender sensitive.  In one such example, she explained how questions about childbirth and stillborn babies in census surveys force women to live their trauma repeatedly.

Raymond Onuoha, ICT policy researcher at Lagos Business School and UNESCO’s inclusive policy lab, pointed out that Internet penetration in Africa is still very low at an average 21% for the continent to benefit fully from the AI economy. He argued that high cost of internet services; low investments in infrastructure along with digital illiteracy are issues that need to be addressed for Africa to fully harness its AI potential.

Nazneen Rajani discussed the ‘Black-Box’ problem of AI and presented how AI models may produce correct results without explaining how these results are produced. The ‘Black-Box’ problem of AI threatens accountability in decisions taken by machines. She shared research on how sustained efforts by researchers to make AI explainable have the potential to improve accountability including based on her approach of ‘Common Sense Reasoning’ to explain the decisions taken by AI algorithms.

Bhanu Neupane of UNESCO underlined the organization’s commitments to capacity building and raising awareness in order to strengthen the digital technology and policy ecosystem in Africa, including through its participation at the Deep Learning Indaba 2020 in Tunisia. He added that the outcomes of the workshop would help achieve the objectives concerning i) Human Capital and social capabilities; and ii) Policy, law and human rights of the UN system-wide strategic approach and roadmap for supporting capacity development on artificial intelligence.

Gallery

This workshop will focus on teaching in a world driven by AI. Participants will work in small groups to stimulate conversations and critically reflect on issues related to skills needed for the AI era and the readiness of teachers to teach those skills.

Furthermore, the participants shall come up with recommendations for relevant teacher trainings, and how to support teachers to prepare for such a challenging time.

The use of AI tools in teaching and learning are still new for many teachers in ASEM countries. There is an urgent need to create awareness and provide practical opportunities to teachers for understanding AI tools in teaching and learning better.

This workshop is integrated in a larger research project by UCL named X5GON, and allows teachers to be part of an experiment where they can evaluate and understand AI teaching and learning tools.

The Information for All Programme (IFAP) provides a platform for a multitude of stakeholders in the knowledge societies to participate in international discussions on policy and guidelines for action in the area of access to information and knowledge.

One of the important crosscutting issues that the programme is addressing relates to universal access to information, as it concerns information for development but also information literacy.

These new competencies, skills and attitudes should enable persons to seek, evaluate, use and create information, thereby empowering them to participate effectively in the knowledge societies.

The ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT CFT) Version 3 addresses recent technological and pedagogical developments in the field of ICT in Education, and incorporates principles of non-discrimination, open and equitable information accessibility and gender equality in the delivery of education supported by technology.

Programme

09:00-09:15 Coffee on arrival
09:15-10:10 Welcome address by UNESCO
  • Mr Jaco du Toit, Programme Specialist, Section for Universal Access and Preservation, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
09:30‑10:00 Self-introduction, objectives and methodology of the workshop
  • Ms Zeynep Varoglu, Programme Specialist, Section for ICT in Education, Science and Culture, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
10:00‑10:30 Key digital and information literacy competencies for AI
  • Mr Colin de la Higuera, UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Training of Teachers through OERs, University of Nantes, France
10:30‑11:00 Lunch break
11:00‑11:15 Session 1: Defining AI competencies and the digital divide
11:00‑11:15 The gender divide and AI competencies
  • Ms Elspeth McOmish, Programme Specialist, Division for Gender Equality, Cabinet of the Director-General, UNESCO
11:15-11:30 Africa and the need to further AI competencies
  • Ms Zulmira Rodrigues, Chief Section for Cooperation with Regional Organizations in Africa, PAX
12:00-12:10 Session 2: Key digital and information literacy competencies for AI (data)
12:00-12:10 Competencies related to data literacy
  • Mr Colin de la Higuera, UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Training of Teachers through OERs, University of Nantes, France
12:10-12:20 AI and STEM education
  • Ms Imteyaz Khodabux, Programme Specialist, Section for Innovation and Capacity Building in Science and Engineering
12:20-12:45

Defining learner and teacher competencies

  • Ms Gihan Osman, Professor, American University of Cairo, Egypt
14:00-14:10

Session 2: Key digital and information literacy competencies for AI (Randomness)

14:00-14:10 Competencies related to “Randomness”
  • Mr Colin de la Higuera, UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Training of Teachers through OERs, University of Nantes, France
14:10-14:20 Future Literacy and AI competencies, future of Education and future competencies
  • Mr Sobhi Tawil, Chief, Education Research and Foresight, Office of the Assistant – Director General for Education, Education Sector UNESCO
14:20-14:45 Defining learner and teacher competencies
  • Mr Vincent Nyirigira, ICT Innovation and Technology Partnerships Engineer, ICT in Education Department, Rwanda Education Board, Rwanda
14.45.-14.55

Session 2: Key digital and information literacy competencies for AI (Coding and computational thinking)

14.45.-14.55 Competencies related to Coding and computational thinking
  • Mr Colin de la Higuera, UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Training of Teachers through OERs, University of Nantes, France
14:55-15:05 Youth Mobile and experiences from Africa Code Week
  • Mr Davide Storti, Programme Specialist, Section for ICT in Education, Science and Culture, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
15:05-15:20 Defining learner and teacher competencies
  • Mr Davide Storti, Programme Specialist, Section for ICT in Education, Science and Culture, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
15:05-15:20 Defining learner and teacher competencies
  • Ms Gihan Osman, Professor, American University of Cairo, Egypt
15:20-15:30

Session 2: Key digital and information literacy competencies for AI (Critical thinking)

15:20-15:30 Competencies related to Critical thinking
  • Mr Colin de la Higuera, UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Training of Teachers through OERs, University of Nantes, France
15:30-15:40 Media and Information Literacy
  • Mr Alton Grizzle, Programme Specialist, Section for Media Development and Society, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
15:40-16:00 Defining learner and teacher competencies
  • Mr Vincent Nyirigira, ICT Innovation and Technology Partnerships Engineer, ICT in Education Department, Rwanda Education Board, Rwanda
Session 2: Key digital and information literacy competencies for AI (Post AI Humanism)
16:15-16:25 Competencies related to Post AI Humanism
  • Mr Vincent Nyirigira, ICT Innovation and Technology Partnerships Engineer, ICT in Education Department, Rwanda Education Board, Rwanda
16:25-16:35 The Ethical Implications of AI
  • Ms Dafna Feinholz, Chief of Section - Bioethics and Ethics of Science, Sector for Social and Human Sciences
16:35-17:00 Defining learner and teacher competencies
  • Ms Gihan Osman, Professor, American University of Cairo, Egypt
17:00-17:15

Session 3: Recommendations and Roadmap

17:15 Final version of the competencies and next steps
  • Ms Zeynep Varoglu, Programme Specialist, Section for ICT in Education, Science and Culture, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO

Gallery

About

Gender Equality is the 5th United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). As with other SDGs, Artificial Intelligence can play a role in promoting good practices, or to the contrary, can enhance the existing biases and prejudices. A recent workshop at IJCAI, in Macao, made the case for a number of projects relating SDGs and Artificial Intelligence.

The Knowledge 4 All Foundation, the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaire de Paris and the UNESCO Chair on OER at Université de Nantes jointly organize this workshop. The workshop will be organized around talks, but interaction will be promoted through active debates around the different questions relevant to the workshop, of which:

  • Bias issues: typically, AI will reproduce the bias in the data. If the data contains a prejudice, the decision making based on AI can reproduce (and sometimes enhance) that prejudice.
  • Gender issues in AI projects: Is it a good idea to add a "gender officer" to an AI project? Someone who can look out so that prejudice doesn't creep in?
  • AI for Education: how educating women can make special sense? What do we need to look out for?

Programme

09:30-10:00 Coffee on arrival
10:00-10:10 Welcome and setting the stage
  • Colin de la Higuera, Université de Nantes, UNESCO Chair in teacher training technologies with OER
10:10‑11:00 Keynote talk
  • Bhavani Rao, UNESCO Chair in Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality (slides)
11:00‑12:30 Session 1: Does AI introduce new risks and opportunities for gender equality?
  • Moderator: Florence Sedes
  • John Shawe-Taylor, UNESCO Chair in Artificial Intelligence (slides)
  • Wendy MacKay,  INRIA National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, Situ Ex
  • Prateek Sibal, ICT in Education Knowledge Societies Division Communication and Information Sector UNESCO (slides)
12:30‑14:00 Lunch break
10:30‑12:00 Session 2: The issue of bias-which are the main reasons for bias and can AI do something about it?
  • Michèle Sebag, CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifique (slides)
  • Frédérique Krupa, Human Machine Design Lab, University Nantes
  • Bhavani Rao, UNESCO Chair in Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality
14:00-15:30 Session 3: AI and education: where women empowerment questions can be looked into
  • Sophie Touzé, VetAgro Sup-Université de Lyon
  • Mitja Jermol, UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning (slides)
  • Florence Sedes, Université de Toulouse and Société Informatique de France
16:00 Wrap-up and final words

Meet the speakers

Bhavani Rao, UNESCO Chair in Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality

Prateek Sibal, ICT in Education Knowledge Societies Division Communication and Information Sector UNESCO

Wendy Mackay, INRIA

John Shawe-Taylor, University College London, UNESCO Chair in AI

Zeynep Varoglu, Programme Specialist, ICT in Education, Knowledge Societies Division, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
Zeynep Varoglu, Programme Specialist, ICT in Education, Knowledge Societies Division, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO

Colin de la Higuera, Nantes University, UNESCO Chair in teacher training technologies with OER
Colin de la Higuera, Nantes University, UNESCO Chair in teacher training technologies with OER

Michèle Sebag, CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifique

Mitja Jermol, UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning

Sophie Touzé, VetAgro Sup-Université de Lyon

Frédérique Krupa, Human Machine Design Lab, University Nantes

Florence Sedes, Université de Toulouse and Société Informatique de France