A view of the workshop to promote Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Social Goods held at HBKU Research Complex yesterday. Pic: Baher Amin / The Peninsula
Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence (QCAI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) organised yesterday a workshop on utilising artificial intelligence to solve humanitarian problems.
The event ‘UNDP-QCAI Artificial Intelligence for Social Good’ aimed at developing an increased understanding of - and identify applications for - the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve real-world developmental and humanitarian problems. The workshop held at the Researchery (formerly known as the HBKU Research Complex).
Representatives from the world’s leading NGOs and UN agencies, as well as academics and industry leaders attended the workshop to explore the opportunities in this regards.
“One of the key objective of QCAI is to elevate poverty and improve living standerd arround the develpming world,” QCAI Research Director, Sanjay Chawla told The Peninsula while sepaking on the sidleines of the event. He said this social good workshop is directly is connected to this objective.
“If you look at the partnern, UNDP which has 17 sustainable develpment goals that is clearly ties with this aspect. The workshop is a platform to meet and discuss how we can use the technology to help them meet the goals,” said Chawla.
Dr. Ingmar Weber, organizer of the event and QCRI’s research director, said: “The workshop provided an opportunity to consider challenges including the ethics related to ensuring AI delivers equal benefits to all, leaving no one behind; technical and legal issues related to data access; as well as operational issues related to the integration of new technologies.
“The focus was on forging a realistic outlook bridging the pessimist’s ‘extreme poverty won’t be solved by algorithms’ and the optimist’s ‘this Twitter sentiment dashboard will change everything’, and on identifying opportunities for partnerships among stakeholders.”
Speakers from UNDP, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (iDMC) and the World Bank discussed on topics including AI for the most vulnerable, and the use of AI to detect, map and quantify internal displacement.
Representatives from private sector and academia also attended to discuss how partnerships can be forged to effect positive change.
