The importance of AI at VUB and in our ‘Global Society’.
Age of exponentials
“During the past few weeks, many new issues concerning AI in its field application and in the wider societal debate have been brought to the attention of the general public. We are living in the ‘age of exponentials’. If you think this year went by quickly, imagine what could happen in the space of another year.
To give you an idea of the speed of change, all of the following happened within a week: JIZAI Robots; Med-PaLM 2; Google x Adobe; launch of Tesla Optimus AI; launch of a new ChatGPT UI; unravelling Unreal Engine 5.2; Amazon initiatives like Burnham and AI Search; the presence of Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI at a hearing in Washington DC; launch of Apple Voice Cloning; new breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s Detection thanks to AI, OpenAI with the launch of Open-Source LLM and much more. Not only does AI impact the way we are living, it also greatly impacts how we work as researchers, how we conduct scientific research, how we develop new methodologies and how we communicate our research results. The way we see its impact on everyone’s daily life is in itself a starting point for new research questions in the field of SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) as is the case in sociology, policy and anthropology. Just like AI already heavily impacted engineering, sciences, and medicine in the past years as well.”
Academia complementing & assessing AI
“AI is a multidisciplinary scientific discipline by its nature and is more than ever reaching out to all of us, and to all scientific experts -from all faculties and domains- to collaborate in research and educational activities. This sheds light on different opportunities and potential challenges and pitfalls when designing, developing and, applying AI techniques in the short as well as in the long term. As legislators and policymakers are globally gearing up to create policy and regulatory frameworks to assure more transparency and liability when it comes to developing and applying AI techniques, all eyes are also on us -academia- to complement and assess developments in the industry and in a not-for-profit context.
Could AI henceforth be considered a nascent ‘Common Good’, as we have seen happening for energy, education and healthcare? Perhaps the answer is already in the question, but along with the joint-university, institute FARI, both Brussels’ universities ULB and VUB forces have been joined together to put this question on the table. Through various initiatives, that have both local and international impact, we hope to be able to captivate as many researchers as possible and have them and you involved in debates as well as in many AI-related events as possible.”
Hans De Canck is Co-Director of FARI (AI for the Common Good Institute in Brussels) and Director of the AI Experience Center of VUB.
Contact: Hans.de.canck@vub.be (+32 478 418 516)
FARI is the independent, not-for-profit Artificial Intelligence initiative led by two universities in Brussels: the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). This initiative aims at helping citizens, politicians and companies as well as not-for-profit organizations to address local, every day or long-term challenges in the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium and Europe. It brings world-leading and future researchers to the service of the city.
It reinforces a virtuous circle: the city encounters problems that FARI can help address with projects that in their turn could lead to major scientific advances, especially in the field of AI (Explainable and Trustworthy), Data (Open) and Robotics (human-centric).