CEIMIA in the Spotlight: participations and events – April to June 2024

Last season, the CEIMIA team had plenty of opportunities to showcase responsible AI on the international stage: a United Nations conference, GPAI’s 2024 Paris Innovation Workshop, AI for Good Global summit 2024… read on!

During the 9th Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation  for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI for the SDGs) organized by the United Nations in New York, CEIMIA’s Executive Director, Sophie Fallaha, participated in a panel discussion on the power of technology for sustainable development and how it can help us achieve the 2033 Sustainable Development Goals. 

The panel featured Jelena Begović, PhD, Minister of Science, Technological Development, and Innovation, Government of Serbia; Lidia Brito, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences; Dr Emanuele Buratti, Group Leader of the Molecular Pathology Lab at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) – a panglobal research organisation; Prof. Vladimir Bulović, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Prof. Vladimir Crnojević, Director of the BIOSENSE Institute, Novi Sad, Serbia. 

The discussion centred on the critical role of science and technology in advancing sustainable development, with a focus on the “International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (IDSSD) 2024-2033”, as well as the new technologies available in the fields of biomedicine, nanotechnologies to fight climate change, food security and sustainable agriculture. In this discussion, Ms. Fallaha explained how AI can support the accomplishment of various SDGs, including poverty eradication, and climate action.

In May, our Researcher in Residence, Thomas Mboa was asked to participate to a special workshop on artificial intelligence by the Comité sur les technologies en bibliothèque du Partenariat des Bibliothèques Universitaires du Québec (Committee on library technologies of the Partnership of University Libraries of Quebec) to discuss how to integrate AI in library contexts. Thomas expressed AI’s potential for cataloging and classifying material, and assisting users in their research. He also highlighted the main ethical, intellectual, cultural, and technological challenges and risks (amongst others) to be considered when integrating such solutions in libraries, and provided helpful recommendations to ensure their responsible use.

See the paper and keynote.

The GPAI Innovation Workshop is a unique platform to enable conversations between Experts, Member government representatives, and their innovation ecosystems. In May, 30 Experts from 24 countries from the four Working Groups and representatives from 15 countries, including GPAI lead chair country India, united for the second GPAI Innovation Workshop in Paris, co-hosted by the Montreal, Paris, and Tokyo Expert Support Centres.

In small groups, they engaged in an intensive exercise of creative thinking. They started out by mapping the challenges and opportunities around three themes: 1) AI Safety; 2) Democratization of AI; and 3) Sustainable Agriculture, then co-designed and developed projects to address the identified issues.

These two days of collaboration led to 10 Actionable and impactful projects for international AI governance that will feed the 2025 GPAI Work Plan, all of which are aligned with Member countries’ current priorities in AI.

During the AI for Good Global Summit organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)  last May in Geneva, Mathieu Marcotte, CEIMIA’s Director of Partnerships and Ecosystems, was part of the official launch of the AI for Good Impact Initiative, alongside HRH Princess Beatrice; Dr Ebtesam Almazrouei, Founder and CEO at AIE3; Werner Vogels, Amazon Chief Technology Officer and Vice President; Frederic Werner, Head of Strategic Engagement at ITU; and Xu Chaofeng, a representative from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

During this event, all the participants agreed on the need to use AI towards achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to support the global advancement of AI for the benefit of humanity. It was mentioned that meaningful cooperation must be a priority on a global scale to support projects that aim to use AI for common good and to help reduce social gaps.

This AI for Good Impact initiative will provide investment and support for various projects and efforts, with a focus on inclusion of developing countries and under strict principles – projects must be:

• Inclusive: Reflecting the diversity and needs of communities globally;
• Scalable: Growing to address pressing challenges at the pace the world requires;

• Repeatable: Open models that can be replicated across different regions and sectors;
• Sustainable: Ensuring tight alignment with all SDGs goals and targets;
• Measurable: Ensuring transparent, quantifiable impact that aligns with the SDGs across all regions.

In June 2024, one of GPAI’s longest running projects, Responsible AI Strategy for the Environment (RAISE) – held a webinar as part of a collaborative initiative with the IEEE Technology Center for Climate on “Tackling Sustainability Through the AI Lifecycle”, the first of a series on AI and Sustainability. Moderated by Tom Coughlin, IEEE President and CEO, the webinar explored how AI creates avenues for solving climate change-related challenges around precision agriculture, smart forestry, digital twins for simulating climate scenarios, and natural disaster management. The discussion also shedded light on lesser-known harmful environmental impacts AI systems engender in particular in terms of carbon footprint: amount of energy consumed throughout its lifecycle, from the development of AI systems -e.g. training of large models- to their deployment and use. 

The webinar featured high-level panelists: experts from the policy-making sphere, academia and industry. Talks revolved around implications of open-source AI, the role of standards and governance tools, regulatory frameworks and compliance requirements, building blocks of sustainable AI and the role of renewables, changes the industry is currently undertaking to consider environmental factors in the design and deployment of AI… The panelists took stances on a variety of topics such as rethinking the way AI is taught, limiting the intensity of compute power needed to develop models, and getting the balance right between voluntary commitments and hard laws regulating AI’s environmental impact. 

Learn more about the other impacts of AI and how experts see its current state and future evolutions.

To celebrate the release of the report and Comparative Framework synthesizing the second phase of research on the emerging approaches to AI regulation globally, CEIMIA hosted a webinar entitled “Launch of the 2024 Comparative Framework for AI Regulatory Policy: Analyzing Leading Countries’ Approaches to AI Regulation”. For over an hour, researcher and co-author Marta Ziosi presented the project, explained how the Comparative Framework was built and put into application in research phases 1 and 2, and exchanged with AI policy experts and government representatives about current challenges that the different jurisdictions are facing, standard requirements, interoperability and the role of AI Safety Institutes.

Read the report