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To battle the novel coronavirus that’s been linked to Wuhan, China, researchers are using artificial intelligence to discover potential treatments, including already-approved drugs and completely new compounds. At the same time, the pneumonia-like illness has only gotten worse. The 2019-nCoV coronavirus had taken the lives of more than 600 people and infected more than 30,000, with cases documented in at least 25 countries.

Researchers at the British artificial intelligence startup Benevolent AI say they used the tech to search for existing approved drugs that might be helpful in limiting the virus’s infection. Another set of scientists affiliated with Deargen, a drug discovery company based in South Korea, say that they used deep learning to find various available antiviral drugs that could be investigated as a potential treatment (that research has not yet been peer-reviewed). Meanwhile, a Maryland-based biotech company, Insilico, said it used AI to come up with new molecules that could serve as potential medications, and it will now synthesize and test 100 of the compounds, according to Fortune.

Here’s how Benevolent described its work: The company’s researchers wanted to find an already-approved drug that could block the infection process. So they sent their AI looking for drugs, based on chemical properties that they knew the coronavirus to have, through a repository of an enormous amount of medical data, including scientific literature.

The system churned out a number of options, which were then whittled down to identify an already-approved drug called Baricitinib, which is typically used to treat moderate and severe rheumatoid arthritis. Now the researchers suggest it could be trialed as a potential treatment. Ivan Griffin, Benevolent’s co-founder, told Recode that while the company hasn’t applied for the right to test the drug in China, it has reached out to manufacturers that already produce the drug. It’s unclear how long it might take before a properly tested drug reaches patients.

The application of AI to the fight against the novel coronavirus comes as the role of the technology in health care expands. In fact, AI already helped epidemiologists flag early reports of the Wuhan coronavirus, as Recode reported last week. Ultimately, the hope is that the technology could make delivering health care more efficient. But the use of artificial intelligence in health care also creates new challenges, like algorithmic bias, and raises new questions for drug regulators.

Find the original article here.

AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN) has the project “AI for Humanity”, lead by professor David Silbersweig, Academic Dean of Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of the AIWS-IN.

Professor Professor Gillian Hadfield is director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, University of Toronto, and author of Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, raises her ideas about creating AI Regulation.

“When even the companies developing AI themselves agree with the need for regulation, it is time to stop discussing abstract principles and get down to the business of how to regulate a rapidly advancing technology landscape.

It is clear that our regulatory system needs an update. If we try to regulate 21st century technology and beyond with 20th century tools, we’ll get none of the benefits of regulation and all of the downsides.

So, if we need to reinvent the rules to keep pace with the technological change advanced by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, where do we start?

Google’s Sundar Pichai is right that technology companies cannot simply build AI and leave it to the will of the market.

But what we can do is try to use the best traits of markets — competition, transparency, rapid iteration — to reform our regulatory system. Specifically, this means pairing strong government oversight with private sector “regulatory markets.”

We are already seeing governments essentially outsource their roles as regulators, leaving matters to self-regulation on an increasing scale. European governments, for example, after creating the right to be forgotten on search engines that pre-dated GDPR, left the task of enforcing this right to search engines themselves. The reason? Governments lacked the technological competence, resources, and political coherence to do so themselves.

A regulatory market is a new solution to the problem of the limited capacity of traditional regulatory agencies, invented for the nation-state manufacturing age, to keep up with the global digital age.

It combines the incentives that markets create to invent more effective and less burdensome ways to provide a service with hard government oversight to ensure that whatever the regulatory market produces, it satisfies the goals and targets set by democratic governments.

So, instead of governments writing detailed rules, governments instead set the goals: What accident rates are acceptable in self-driving cars? What amount of leakage from a confidential data set is too much? What factors must be excluded from an algorithmic decision?

Then, instead of tech companies deciding for themselves how they will meet those goals, the job is taken on by independent companies that move into the regulatory space, incentivized to invent streamlined ways to achieve government-set goals.”

The original article can be found here.

AIWS Innovation Network Roundtable on United Nations 2045, started on 02/02/2020, and the first session will discuss this issue on 02/20/2020. Governor Michael Dukakis, co-founder of AIWS Innovation Network, will be the moderator of the roundtable.

Instead of machines pursuing goals of their own, the new thinking goes, they should seek to satisfy human preferences; their only goal should be to learn more about what our preferences are. Russell contends that uncertainty about our preferences and the need to look to us for guidance will keep AI systems safe. In his recent book, Human Compatible

Russell’s ideas are “making their way into the minds of the AI community,” said Yoshua Bengio, the scientific director of Mila, a top AI research institute in Montreal. He said Russell’s approach, where AI systems aim to reduce their own uncertainty about human preferences, can be achieved with deep learning — the powerful method behind the recent revolution in artificial intelligence, where the system sifts data through layers of an artificial neural network to find its patterns. “Of course more research work is needed to make that a reality,” he said.

The original article can be found here.

AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN) is a platform for distinguished thinkers, innovators practice concepts, principles of the AIWS Social Contract 2020 for a peace, security, and prosperity. This issue can become an initiative in the AIWS-IN.

Diversity and inclusion took centre stage at one of the world’s major artificial-intelligence (AI) conferences in 2018. But once a meeting with a controversial reputation, last month’s Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference in Vancouver, Canada, saw attention shift to another big issue in the field: ethics.

The focus comes as AI research increasingly deals with ethical controversies surrounding the application of its technologies — such as in predictive policing or facial recognition. Issues include tackling biases in algorithms that reflect existing patterns of discrimination in data, and avoiding affecting already vulnerable populations. “There is no such thing as a neutral tech platform,” warned Celeste Kidd, a developmental psychologist at University of California, Berkeley, during her NeurIPS keynote talk about how algorithms can influence human beliefs. At the meeting, which hosted a record 13,000 attendees, researchers grappled with how to meaningfully address the ethical and societal implications of their work.

Ethics gap

Ethicists have long debated the impacts of AI and sought ways to use the technology for good, such as in health care. But researchers are now realizing that they need to embed ethics into the formulation of their research and understand the potential harms of algorithmic injustice, says Meredith Whittaker, an AI researcher at New York University and founder of the AI Now Institute, which seeks to understand the social implications of the technology. At the latest NeurIPS, researchers couldn’t “write, talk or think” about these systems without considering possible social harms, she says. “The question is, will the change in the conversation result in the structural change we need to actually ensure these systems don’t cause harm?”

The article proceeds to describe potential solutions to solve this “ethics gap”.

The original article can be found here.

AIWS Innovation Network supports the establishment of standards from AIWS Social Contract 2020 in order to maintain ethics in the face of technological advancement.

The European Union is considering new legally binding requirements for developers of artificial intelligence in an effort to ensure modern technology is developed and used in an ethical way.

The EU’s executive arm is set to propose the new rules apply to “high-risk sectors,” such as healthcare and transport, and suggest the bloc updates safety and liability laws, according to a draft of a so-called “white paper” on artificial intelligence obtained by Bloomberg. The European Commission is due to unveil the paper in mid-February and the final version is likely to change.

The paper is part of the EU’s broader effort to catch up to the U.S. and China on advancements in AI, but in a way that promotes European values such as user privacy. While some critics have long argued that stringent data protection laws like the EU’s could hinder innovation around AI, EU officials say harmonizing rules across the region will boost development.

The original article can be found here.

Section Monitor of the AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN) at https://aiws.world/monitoring-and-judging/monitoring/ will serve as a platform to bring authoritative knowledge and raise awareness about violations of ethical values and standards by governments and large organizations. The platform will monitor and alert against the misuse of Artificial Intelligence (AI), personal data, and neglect of cyber security. The objectives of the campaign are to stimulate and galvanize civil society towards the need to create new norms and regulations, and therein influence public and private AI and cyber policy.

Neon’s super realistic digital people are real. Well, sort of.

The mysterious company, emerging from the Samsung Technology and Advanced Research Labs (aka STAR Labs), debuted late Monday at CES 2020 here in Las Vegas. It described its technology, also called Neon, as “a computationally created virtual being that looks and behaves like a real human, with the ability to show emotions and intelligence.”

Basically, Neon makes video chatbots that look and act like real people. Neons aren’t all-knowing smart assistants, androids, surrogates or copies of real humans, the company said in an FAQ shared with reporters. They can’t tell you the weather or how old Abraham Lincoln was when he died.

“Neons are not AI assistants,” the company said. “Neons are more like us, an independent but virtual living being, who can show emotions and learn from experiences. Unlike AI assistants, Neons do not know it all, and they are not an interface to the internet to ask for weather updates or to play your favorite music.”

The original article can be found here.

AI World Society Social Contract 2020 define AI Assistants as one of the 7 centers of power in the digital and AI age. This Social Contract was presented at the Riga Conference 2019 and World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid Policy Dialog on October 21, 2019 in Madrid.

More investment in tech that addresses climate change. With all due respect to Greta Thunberg and the efforts of young people across the globe to bring attention to climate change, governments may never agree on how to properly address our lurch toward environmental suicide. Which is why it is critically important that tech turn its focus toward creating products that will save us. The amount of investment in green technology remains stubbornly low compared with other tech sectors. Bill Gates and Elon Musk have been making more investments in this area, but they remain the only big names doing so. That’s too bad, since I think the world’s first trillionaire will be a green-tech entrepreneur. There are many areas to explore, including battery storage, renewables, software and artificial intelligence to help us understand climate data, the food ecosystem and even the way we construct our buildings. The most important challenge is finding a way to keep carbon in the ground — and figuring out the best way to do that provides a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Automation for good. There has been a lot of discussion about the job-killing potential of tech, including how an unholy combination of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence will be the death of employment. Many jobs will, in fact, be replaced by tech, especially ones that are rote and also many that are high paying in medicine, law and more. But this is also an opportunity to rethink the entire way we imagine employment and education. The smartest minds in tech should be thinking about reformulating and recalibrating the workplace and the structure of businesses. And rather than accept that poor pay and poor protections for gig workers are inevitable and that the pressures of a global work force are too hard to push back, tech companies should figure out how to creatively and humanely deploy talent across the world to show that they are interested in dealing with the consequences of their inventions.

Is there a business in depolarization? I get that the forces of cynicism, manipulation and hate are forever on the digital march, but I am convinced that there is money to be made in appealing to our weariness with how our tech lives have been shaped. There are ways to foster digital interaction that do not have to incite rage. The reason much of social media feels so toxic is it has been built for speed, virality and attention grabbing rather than for context and accuracy. While it seems impossible to imagine a new kind of social-network product in the shadow of Facebook, TikTok, for all its controversy as a Chinese-owned company, has been a runaway success (the first big social success since Snapchat arrived in 2011), and there is room for more. There are opportunities to create new forms of communication that give the advantage to users — by strictly enforcing behavior standards and eliminating anonymity, and most of all, with advertising-based business plans that are not predicated on taking advantage of our personal data.

Can diversity keep on punching? One of the great disappointments of the past decade has been the continued racial, gender and age imbalance in the leadership teams and, more important, in the ownership of most tech companies. That would be mostly white men, and more specifically, young white men. All the reporting that has been done by the companies themselves on this imbalance — kudos for finally counting what has been clear to anyone who can see — has also made it apparent that the numbers are not moving in a more inclusive direction. You can debate how talent is discovered and developed all you want, but the bottom line is that a more diverse work force results in more innovative products. Which is why the recent start of several women-led venture capital firms — many of which have been funded by investors like Melinda Gates — is an encouraging sign. Capital formation is where it all begins, and eliminating the “cap gap” — capitalization tables that are skewed to one kind of investor — is digging into the heart of the problem.

Will you put down that phone? There has been a lot of gnashing and wailing about screen addiction, “sharenting” and the myriad other negative effects of all the devices we have come to rely on. (I am guilty as charged.) These gadgets have been designed to hook you, not unlike sugar or cigarettes or gambling or opiates. The well known techie Tristan Harris calls it “human downgrading” — and he’s right. But there is yet another opportunity here to push for design ethics, a movement that I think will gain traction as we all assess what our dives into digital have done to humanity. While our tech devices have, on the whole, been good for most people, there is a true business opportunity in making them work more efficiently and without a reliance on addiction. Whether we move toward more intuitively created tech that surrounds us or that incorporates into our bodies (yes, that’s coming), I am going to predict that carrying around a device in our hand and staring at it will be a thing of the past by 2030. And like the electrical grid we rely on daily, most tech will become invisible.

That’s right, I am calling it now: There will be an internet in the future that stops screaming at us. Added bonus: President Trump’s tweets will probably be gone, too.

The original article can be found here.

The AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN), with the domain name AIWS.world, will monitor AI developments and uses by governments, corporations, and non-profit organizations to assess whether they comply with the norms and standards codified in the AIWS Social Contract 2020. Noncompliant actors will be identified and publicized through fact-based reports.

AIWS Young Leaders will be a cornerstone of the monitoring effort, given their connection to AI developments in their respective countries.

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students’ privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

AIWS Innovation Network supports the establishment of standards from AIWS Social Contract 2020 in order to protect privacy rights

The original article can be found here.

Finland already let the whole world know this country is for disruption (in a good way). On December 10, Sanna Marin at the age of 34, officially became Finland’s youngest-ever prime minister. She is the world’s youngest currently-serving state leader.

Now comes AI. Finland has been offering free AI education to every EU citizen. Reaktor, a private sector technology consultancy, and the University of Helsinki, Finnish oldest university, decided to join forces to make “The Elements of AI”, an online course available in all the official EU languages. This course is designed specifically for those with limited technology knowledge. So far, more than 220,000 students worldwide have enrolled. Over 40% of them are women and over 25% over the age of 45.

The AI World Society (AIWS) appreciates this significant initiative.  Bringing free AI education to the public fits well in the framework of our AIWS Innovation Network. We agree with its proponents that, by making AI understandable to average citizens, the course empowers them to have a voice and to make a difference in a technology-driven future.

More information about the Finnish free-AI education initiative can be found here.