EPTA-2023

EPTA 2023

CONFERENCE

Generative Artificial Intelligence – Opportunities, Risks, and Policy Challenges

(A time for technology assessment to parliaments)

Monday, 9th of October

Conference topic description

Large generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as ChatGPT, have become extremely popular in just a few months making it the fastest growing online application in history. As such, they emerge as a transformative force with profound implications on democracies and civil society. Is generative AI a promise or a peril for democracies, or even for human existence?

The annual EPTA conference will explore the social and legal challenges that generative AI poses for policymakers, civil society and regulators.

Is it necessary to establish regulatory frameworks to address generative AI’s social and democratic challenges? Or would general AI regulation suffice to address the latter? Which characteristics of generative AI can be considered when evaluating the convenience of establishing specific policy and regulatory frameworks for it? Which are the potential benefits, challenges and ethical considerations associated to the application of generative AI in key areas such as health or education? Is generative AI designed to disempower and displace workers? Can we even foresee the impact that generative AI will have on the job market?

To disentangle these questions the annual EPTA conference will highlight the following three focal points:

1. Generative artificial intelligence and democracy

While generative AI may potentially be understood as a tool to enhance democratic governance, it can critically damage the latter.

A deep concern in terms of democracy is related to the risks of misinformation, opacity or fake news, or even the question on how to deal with the fact that technology companies have the power to establish a public narrative, facing the risk that independent critical thinking will be abandoned in order to obtain a fast answer from AI systems. Moreover, since most of the population does not have deep knowledge of generative AI, it is worth asking which kind of mandate can be given to legislators and policymakers. Within parliaments, the use of generative AI in their day-to-day work could be a useful tool, but representatives, too, are likely to see their relationships with their electorate compromised by generative AI.

2. Policy considerations on the integration of generative artificial intelligence in specific sectors

In this session policymakers, researchers and stakeholders will address the challenges and opportunities presented by generative AI in specific sectors, such as health or education, and will identify best practices for the responsible integration of generative AI in these areas.

In the health sector, generative AI is envisioned to aid in diagnosis, clinical advice and drug and vaccine discovery, as well as fostering personalised medicine. Thus, AI is being used to provide better diagnoses, and generative AI could substitute certain clinical actions to save time to medical practitioners with the aim of improving the medical service.

However, the use of AI in medicine also has some risks and ethical concerns. The risk of generating biased AI outputs (as the data source is itself biased in terms of ethnicity, sex or other factors) or the lack of clinical safety considerations may require a regulatory framework. Or could it even be that generative AI substitutes medical effort on diagnosis for more automatised responses?

Similarly, in terms of education, generative AI can transform learning experiences and assessment methods and can generate content adapted to individual student needs. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has accelerated the creation of other tools that can produce high quality language texts, images or computer codes with remarkable speed. However, issues concerning intellectual property, data security or even the impact on human creativity and critical thinking might be part of the concerns and future implications of generative AI for knowledge, learning and research, in particular at a very early stage of humans’ educational process.

3. Generative artificial intelligence and work

One of the issues widely discussed among researchers is whether generative AI will create mass unemployment by displacing most workers and, furthermore, which will be the effects in terms of social inequality. Can we foresee a huge substitution of qualified workers for AI algorithms? Can we expect an equivalent creation of new jobs? Generative AI will most likely change the nature of our work and the way we work. Which tools do we have to address this question?

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

8.30 am Arrival of the participants and accreditation
9 am Beginning of conference
Welcome speeches and thematic introduction by the keynote speaker
GARY MARCUS, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University
10 am Session 1: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Democracy
Chair: Wolfgang Hiller, Director in the European Parliament’s Research Service responsible for Impact Assessment and Foresight
Speakers:

  • KARINA GIBERT, Full Professor and Director of Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at UPC and Dean of the Catalan Official Professional college on Informatics Engineering
  • JÉRÔME DUBERRY, Managing Director of the Tech Hub and Senior Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy
  • ULRIK NILSSON, Member of Riksdag (Swedish Parliament)
  • BRANDO BENIFEI, member of the European Parliament and co-rapporteur of the AI Act (online)
  • MARTA R. COSTA-JUSSÀ, Scientific researcher at The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Team, META AI (online)
12 pm Lunch
1.15 pm Session 2: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Policy
Section 1: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Health
Chair: Nicklas Bang Bådum, The Danish Board of Technology (DBT)
Speakers:

  • PAULA PETRONE, IS Global Associate Research Professor and Head of the Biomedical Data Science Team at IS
  • JOSÉ IBEAS, M.D. Ph.D. Master’s Degree in Evidence-based Medicine and Director of Health AI Catalonia Government’s programme
Section 2: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Education
Chair: STEFFEN ALBRECHT, Senior Project Manager at the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag
Speakers:

  • CARLES SIERRA, Director of IIIA of the Spanish National Research Council
  • ENKELEJDA KASNECI, Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professor for Human-Centered Technologies for Learning at the Technical University of Munich
3.30 pm Coffee break
4 pm Session 3: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Work
Chair: FERRAN DOMÍNGUEZ GARCÍA, Parliament of Catalonia’s Legal Advisor
Speakers:

  • VIRGINIA DIGNUM, Professor in Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, and scientific Director of WASP-HS in Sweden
  • AINA GALLEGO, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona
5.30 pm Closing session

REGISTRATION FORM

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SPEAKERS

GARY MARCUS, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence, is a scientist, bestselling author and founder of Robust.AI and the machine learning startup Geometric.AI, which was acquired by Uber.
He is well known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. He has published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behaviour to neuroscience, genetics and artificial intelligence often in leading journals such as Science and Nature.
Marcus testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee last May on the topic “The need for AI regulation”.
An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of serveral books, including, “The Algebraic Mind,” “Kluge,” “The Birth of the Mind,”, the New York Times bestseller “Guitar Zero”. He is also editor of the book “The future of the brain: essays by the world’s leading neuroscientists” featuring the 2014 Nobel Laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser. His most recent book, “Rebooting AI,” with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.
Marcus frequently contributes to The New Yorker, Wired and The New York Times.

WOLFGANG HILLER, Director in the European Parliament’s Research Service responsible for Impact Assessment and Foresight.

Having graduated from Vienna University of Economics, he worked inter alia as speechwriter and specialist in the Economic Coordination Department at the Federal Chancellery in Austria before joining the European Parliament in 1992.
Prior to his current function on 2016, he held various positions within Parliament’s services and the European Commission, including as Head of the Parliament’s office in Vienna, the Secretariat for the Conference of Presidents and as a member of the Secretary-General’s private office in charge of interinstitutional relations and relations with national parliaments.
The services he oversees aim to enhance the European Parliament’s capacity to conduct scrutiny and oversight of the executive, particularly through ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of EU legislation, both before and after it is adopted by the Union’s institutions.
This work is designed to support parliamentary committees in the successive stages of the policy. This responsibility also includes the administrative support of the European Parliament’s 27- Member Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA), which provides scientific advice to the Members and the parliamentary committees. It also involves coordinating the institutions’ foresight activities and fostering collaboration with other institutions in this field.

KARINA GIBERT, Director of Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Full Professor

Karina holds a Bachelor and PhD in Informatics Engineering with specialities in Computational Statistics and Artificial Intelligence. Director and cofounder of the research center Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDEAI). Dean of the Official Professional College of Informatics Engineering of Catalonia (COEINF).
Expert ant co-writer of the Catalan Strategy for AI, Catalonia.ai. She is member of the Committee for the Ethics of Data from Catalan Government, from 2021 and member of the Board of Directors of the Program in Health and AI of Catalan Government (2023-). She is also expert from the Senate and Advisor of SEDIA in ethics in AI and digital transformation, advisor of WHO in characterizing mental health systems (2008-2010) and advisor of EC in ethics in AI.
Very active in bridging the gender gap in the STEAM sector she founded up to 5 gender working groups. WiDS (Standford) ambassador for Barcelona from 2021. Secretary of Barcelona Chapter of Women in ACM 2022. Editor of JRC journal Environmental Modeling and Software, Elsevier, (Jan 2018-).
Her main research interests are to extract strategic knowledge from data and intelligent systems from an ethics and explainable perspective. She is principal researcher of projects like Diet4You, INSESS-COVID19 Top Rosies Talent or ciutadanIA. Essential characteristics of her research are the multidisciplinarity, the externalization, the internationalization, technology transfer and social use of technology. National Informatics Engineering Award in Digital Dissemination 2022. She has been awarded with the Ada Byron Award 2022, donaTIC 2018 Award, an honorific Mention of Creu Casas Award 2021 and 2022 First HackingBullipedia contest Award (nov 2013).

JÉRÔME DUBERRY, Managing Director of the Tech Hub and Senior Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy

Dr. Jérôme Duberry is Managing Director of the Tech Hub, Academic Advisor of the Executive Programme in Diplomacy, Negotiation and Policy-Making, and Senior Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy (AHCD) and at the Centre for International Environmental Studies (CIES).
Since 2022, Jérôme co-leads a scientific communication project on storytelling, youth, and artificial intelligence funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Author of “Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: Risks and Promises of AI-Mediated CitizenGovernment Relations”.

ULRIK NILSSON, Member of Riksdag (Swedish Parliament)

He coursed Chemical Engineering with a physical foundational education, Chalmers University of Technology. Additionally, he completed reserve officer training at KA/Naval Warfare School. Since 2022, he is Member of the Committee on the Constitution.
In the realm of public service, he held roles at the Swedish National Testing and Research Institute/Swedish Technical Research Institute from 1988 to 1998 and in 2007. He also served as Regional Councilor for Västra Götaland Region from 1998 to 2006, and chaired the Municipal Executive Board for Borås Municipality from 2007 to 2010.
He contributed to governance through roles on the Advisory Board for Västra Götaland County and as Chairman of the Institutional Board of the School of Engineering at Borås University. These positions reflect his dedication to the progress of his community and educational institutions.

BRANDO BENIFEI, member of the European Parliament and co-rapporteur of the AI Act

Brando Benifei was born in La Spezia in 1986. He studied law at the University of Bologna and the London School of Economics.
He is a member of the European Parliament since 2014 and reelected in 2019. Likewise, he is currently the chief of the Italian delegation of the Group of Socialists and Democrats at the European Parliament. His main legislative activity concerns digitalisation and artificial intelligence as a member of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, where he is co-rapporteur on the Artificial Intelligence Act. Other legislative activity concerns employment and social affairs, constitutional affairs and legal affairs.
The Politico EU newspaper ranked him and Dragos Tudorache (corapporteur on the AI Act) on the first place among the Tech Rulemakers of 2022. He was also named European Leader 2022 of the Obama Foundation. In 2016, Forbes listed Brando Benifei among the most influential under 30s in EU politics. Furthermore, in March 2018 he received the MEP of the Year award (MEP Awards) in the Employment and Social Affairs category, for his extensive work on youth unemployment.

MARTA R. COSTA-JUSSÀ, Scientific researcher at The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Team, META AI

Marta R. Costa-jussà is a research scientist at The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Team, META AI since February 2022. She received her PhD from the UPC in 2008. Her research experience is mainly in Machine Translation. She has worked at LIMSI-CNRS (Paris), Barcelona Media Innovation Center, Universidade de São Paulo, Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore), Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Mexico), the University of Edinburgh and at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Barcelona), co-leading the MT-UPC Group.
She has participated in 18 European/Spanish research projects; she has organised 12 workshops in top venues and she has published more than 100 papers. She has been part of the Editorial Board of the Computer Speech and Language journal. She has received an ERC Starting Grant and two Google Faculty Research Awards (2018 and 2019).

NICKLAS BANG BÅDUM, Senior Project Manager at the Danish Board of Technology (DBT)

Nicklas Bådum is specialized in engaging citizens and stakeholders in the governance of new and emerging technology, research and innovation. He works with designing, implementing and coordinating national and international participatory and deliberative citizen and stakeholder processes, addressing topics such as ethics, privacy and societal implications of the technology, as well as co-creating responsible and human-centric technology.
The outputs of these processes equip policy- and decision makers to make decisions informed by thorough analyses of informed public sentiment and multi-stakeholder views. He has led a number of cross-European participatory processes on AI, data protection, privacy and health-data infrastructures.

PAULA PETRONE, IS Global Associate Research Professor and Head of the Biomedical Data Science Team at IS Global

Paula Petrone leads the Biomedical Data Science Team at ISGlobal, specializing in diagnosing chronic and infectious diseases using computer vision and advanced machine learning techniques.
She graduated with a degree in Physics from Instituto Balseiro and earned her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University. With an entrepreneurial spirit, she founded the startup Phenobyte Life Sciences and has over a decade of experience as a data scientist in the life science and digital health sectors.
Currently, she works as a consultant, mentor, and activist, focusing on ethics, artificial intelligence, and diversity in STEM careers. Annually, she organizes the Women in Data Science Biomedicine Barcelona event.

JOSÉ IBEAS, M.D. Ph.D. Master’s Degree in Evidence-based Medicine and Director of Health AI Catalonia Government’s programme

Director of the Clinical, Interventional and Computational Nephrology Group (CICN) of the Research and Innovation Institute of the Parc Taulí University Hospital, Sabadell (Barcelona) and Member the of the Clinical Research Ethics Committee.
Co-Director of the Mixed Unit between the CICN and the School of Engineering of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Co-Director of the Master in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Health of Parc Taulí University Hospital & School of Engineering of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Coordinator-Elect of the Artificial Intelligence working group of the Spanish Society of Nephrology.
Coordinator of the Vascular Access Program of the Parc Taulí University Hospital. President of the Spanish Multidisciplinary Group on Vascular Access (GEMAV). Past-President of the Vascular Access Society (VAS). Council of the Interventional Nephrology working group of the Spanish Society of Nephrology.
Chair of the Clinical Guidelines on Vascular Access of the GEMAV, council of the European Vascular Access Guidelines of the European Renal Association and member of the Clinical Practice Guide on Chronic Renal Disease Group of the Spanish National Health System. He has been a member of the council of the International Committee of the American Society of Diagnostic and Interventional Nephrology.

STEFFEN ALBRECHT, Senior Project Manager at the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB)

Steffen Albrecht is a researcher at the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB). He holds a PhD in sociology from Hamburg University of Technology and has since focused on the impact of digitalization on different areas of society. His work at TAB includes assessments of biotechnologies as well as digital technologies with a special focus on citizen participation. Most recently, he was responsible for TAB’s study on ChatGPT for the German Bundestag.

CARLES SIERRA, Director of IIIA of the Spanish National Research Council

Carles Sierra is Research Professor and the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) located in the area of Barcelona.
He is an Adjunct Professor of the Western Sydney University. Also, proud recipient of the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award 2019. He has participated in more than forty research projects funded by the European Union and different governments and has published more than three hundred articles in scientific journals and conferences.

ENKELEJDA KASNECI, Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professor for Human-Centered Technologies for Learning at the Technical University of Munich

Prof. Dra. Enkelejda Kasneci is a Distinguished Professor (“Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professorship”) for Human-Centered Technologies for Learning at the School of Social Sciences& Technology and Core Member of the Munich Data Science Institute. From December 2019 until July 2022, she was Professor for Media Informatics and Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tübingen and served to this department as the Dean of Studies. In 2013, she received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tübingen. For her PhD research, she was awarded the Research Prize of the Federation Südwestmetall in 2014.
Her research evolves around Human-Centered Technologies and AI systems that sense and infer the user’s cognitive state, the level of task-related expertise, actions, and intentions based on multimodal data and provide information for media and assistive technologies in many activities of everyday life, and especially in the context of learning. She is member of the Cyber Valley research alliance and of the DFG Excellence Cluster Machine Learning in the Sciences. She is also actively engaged to support young women in STEM and particularly in Computer Science.

FERRAN DOMÍNGUEZ GARCÍA, Parliament of Catalonia’s Legal Advisor

Ferran Domínguez García is legal advisor of the Parliament of Catalonia where he has been in charge of tasks of human resources and public procurement. He is Doctor of Laws of the European University Institute (EUI) of Florence and his research focuses on territorial organization and fundamental rights.
From 2008 to 2022, he was the Secretary of the Advisory Board of the Parliament of Catalonia for Science and Technology (CAPCIT, in Catalan).

VIRGINIA DIGNUM, Professor in Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, and scientific Director of WASP-HS in Sweden

Virginia Dignum is scientific Director of WASP-HS, the largest Swedish national research program on fundamental multidisciplinary research on the societal and human impact of AI.
She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), and a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI).
She is also member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the World Economic Forum’s Global Artificial Intelligence Council, the UNESCO expert group on the implementation of AI recommendations, the Executive Committee of the IEEE Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design, and of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance. She was a member of EU’s High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and leader of UNICEF’s guidance for AI and children. She is author of “Responsible Artificial Intelligence: developing and using AI in a responsible way”.

AINA GALLEGO, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona

Aina Gallego is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona and a Research Associate at Institut de Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and the Institute of Political Economy and Governance.
She has a long-standing interest in the political representation of marginalised groups. Her book “Unequal Participation Worldwide” (Cambridge University Press) analysed inequalities in voter turnout from a comparative perspective and argued that turnout gaps can be reduced through institutional reforms. Her current research agenda investigates the political consequences of technological change, including artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on workers vulnerable to technological displacement.
Before coming to the University of Barcelona, she was an Associate Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Spanish High Research Council and at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and have been the recipient of a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant. She was a Ramon y Cajal Researcher and now is the receipient of an ICREA Academia, a research intensification award.

HOW TO GET THERE

Accesses to Parc de la Ciutadella

Underground: Línia 1 (Arc de Triomf), línia 4 (Barceloneta, Ciutadella-Vila Olímpica)
Train: Arc de Triomf i Estació de França
Trambesòs (Tram): T4 (Wellington)
Buses: D20, H14, H16, 47, 59, 120, V13, V15, V17, V19
Parking: Av. Marquès de l’Argentera, 8 (Estació de França); Pl. Comercial, 1; C. Comerç, 32; Pg. Lluís Companys, 21; C. Ramon Trias Fargas, 21.

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