Two events — the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) and AI for Good Global Summit — made their marks this year at the International Telecomunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switrzerland.
Although not related, the two events had a lot in common. The two summits are both making headway in their solutions to achieve the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through new Information and Communications Technology (ICT), particularly on how a new series of cheap nanosatellites will help connect the unconnected.
This year’s WSIS was chaired by Mustafa Jabbar, Minister of Post and Telecommunications from Bangladesh, an icon in his country for developing the Bangla language software for digital education system. The summit gathered more then 3,000 participants from 120 countries composed of ministers, CEOs, members of the academe, and representatives of non-government organization (NGOs) and the private sector.
The program consisted of 250 sessions divided in open consultations, workshops, debates on various subjects like ICT for good, education, agriculture, cyber security, gender equality, health, infrastructure, innovation, and business opportunities.
Some special tracks for the summit included:
• ICT and Sports: on how to enhance the sport experience, using ETPS – Electronic Performance and Tracking System, Ultra Definition Video and Virtual Reality;
• Youth and ICTs: to continue to attract young entrepreneurs to present their own projects and ICT-based solutions for development in their own country;
WSIS and Accessibility: a whole day event to inform attendees how ICTs help people with disabilities integrate in society and lead a normal life. The day focused on five issues — security, communication, mobility, education and emergencies.
One interesting innovation was presented by young entrepreneurs from Esquela Politechnica de Ejercitio of Quito, Ecuador who were eventually awarded with the WSIS Champion Prize.
HandEye is an inclusive technology start-up that developed a pin/button that can be attached to the shirt or around the neck. The device allows children with visual impairments to walk alone and avoid obstacles. It is now deployed in schools, not only in Ecuador, but also in Latin America.
The exhibition was small but one start-up caught the attention.SatRevolution, a real time Earth Observation Satellite System from Poland that is also helping UN achieve the SDGs. Established in 2016, SatRevolution is a constellation of 1,000 cubesats to be positioned in low Earth orbit (LEO) between now and year 2026. The aim is to attain 50 cm resolution and 30 min refresh time. The weight of each satellite will be 10 kg and will have “on board image processing” based on AI Machine Learning. The first satellite was scheduled for launch in July 2019.
Nanosatellites are now in demand for collecting data, mapping the Earth, and for use in various other applications aligned with SDGs. There are also new applications in agriculture, mining, health, environment, climate change, remote control, IoT and to bridge the digital divide.
WSIS this year exceeded the expectations with the number of projects supporting SDGs.
AI for Good Initiative
Launched three years ago, AI for Good is a global initiative to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop positive impact projects worldwide. It is primarily aimed at putting AI at the service of social innovation by supporting UN’s 17 SDGs through concrete ICT and AI solutions.
AI for Good Initiative lead by ITU, X Prize, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and 34 sister organizations now promote the use of AI to adress the most pressing global challenges such as poverty, education, health care, and environment.
UN is working to keep AI development the central piece of the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” to be inclusive and transparent and to make sure that AI helps all segments of society equally.
This year AI for Good Global Summit was well-attended with 2,500 participants from last year’s 700 attendees. This year’s summit identified practical opportunities of AI to accelerate progress towards achieving SDGs.
One of the most difficult issues tackled was the establishment of a standard digital format that could be accepted by the whole international community. That’s where ITU gets into the picture. Data needs to be shared via a common format using a standard that is robust, transparent, and stable and to ensure that data from hundreds of sources uses the same format.
Testing and model approval are the first steps for adoption. It is for this reason that ITU and the World Health Organization launched a project to develop a framework to allow a standardized and transparent evaluation of AI methods. Afterwards, the model could be “certified” by entities in each country and rolled on the market.
A long process is required to ensure that AI benefits ALL and it is really for the GOOD of everyone.
This event attracted a very diverse crowd. AI experts from industry and academia, global business leaders, heads of UN agencies, NGOs, inventors, and even world chess champions, world racing champions, musician and technologists attended.
The show floor was dynamic with live demos of apps like Watson Live Debater, Fusion Exoskeleton, RoboRace, a self-driving racing car, social robots for the care of the elderly, and AI inspired performances.
IBM already gave us spectacular demos of man vs machine in playing games like Deep Blue (Chess computer), Watson (Jeopardy), AlphaGO (go game advantage AI). One of the more interesting demonstration of AI presented live was Watson’s Project Debate “Speech by crowd.”
The Debate Technology goes far. The algorithm captures the notion of an argument; collects arguments from more than 100,000 people (social media and other sources) and then generates a comprehensive narrative.
With applications in sales and marketing IBM’s “Speech by crowd” will be released in few months to companies interested to use it. Although there has been no common consensus on what AI is, or if the name is even correct at all, everybody agrees that AI has the potential to alter our lives to a great extent. The summit agreed that the time to talk, to establish some rules and structures, and to prevent that the next industrial revolution is not becoming a “Winner takes-it-all event” is NOW!
The crucial factor for managing societal changes induced by AI, IoT, machine learning is TIME. But do we still have time?
As a matter of urgency, experts at this summit proposed to rethink education, health, environment, social safety issues, relationships between individuals, state, and the corporate sector, and inequalities induced by technical progress.
The work of the conference was divided into five tracks: AI for education; AI for health; AI for space; Scaling AI for Good; AI and Human dignity and inclusive society.
For a life of multiple careers and skills, people need an education that prepares them for a life-long process of training and retraining. Not easy as humans hate insecurity.
Two projects in education were launched here:
• AI for Families – to educate communities, parents, educators, and children about AI.
• AI Mentoring – a hands-on program to help industry professionals in their reflection and AI goal setting.
Erickson and UNESCO have already launched a new global AI education program to create opportunities that scale up skills development in AI and develop digital skills of young people.
AI for Health founded a focus group last year and work is in progress to develop a standardized framework for the early detection of outbreaks of diseases, and benchmarking of diagnosis, drugs and much more.
AI for Human Dignity, Inclusive Society, Accountability and Privacy is not an easy task as we do not have a rule book and today’s regulatory laws are outdated.
There are issues to be considered like protection of minorities and vulnerable people; to make sure that data, coding and system strategists come from a diverse and inclusive environment. Also an important consideration: that AI does not interfere with human rights and that AI will not exacerbate the digital divide.
UNICEF and UNESCO are leading some projects on AI and human dignity regulations, AI and children’s rights, and AI and digital identity.
AI for Space, Satellite Imagery
It is no secret that since 2017, it’s been possible to capture an image of the entire Earth’s surface every day.
Satellite Imagery and AI have the potential to map poverty, schools, recreational areas, crops, and to start adequate development projects linked with SDGs for a real global AI positive impact. Spacecraft health caring can be a new application of AI and this is promoted by the European Space Agency (ESA). There is also the AI “Personal Assistant” that control space missions.
A special Interest Group has been set up to study how data generated from a space mission can be used with AI to generate machine data models.
The Summit recognized that AI has the ability to shape the world for a better future, but key concerns remain on what can be achieved.
But there are so much more lingering questions and issues. These require us to ‘Think differently.’
Houlin Zhao, Secretary General of ITU, urged participants to “balance technological progress with social progress.” He said “unprecedented collaboration among all stakeholders is needed to achieved safe, trusted and inclusive AI to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.”
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Roxana Dunnette is a correspondent of Satellite Executive Briefing based in Geneva, Switzerland. She is Executive Director, R&D MEDIA, Switzerland. She has had an extensive career in Broadcasting and media including senior management positions at Worldspace, CBS and PBS in New York and international telecommunications regulatory work at the UN in New York and ITU in Geneva as US government representative. She accomplished many development projects in Africa based on satellite technologies, broadcasting, Internet and accessibility. She can be reached at: roxanadunnette@gmail.com
