Workshops

From Principles to Practice - Creating the Standards for Ethically Aligned Design (IEEE)

Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (A/IS), and more often referred to as AI, have potential for vast improvements to efficiency, automation, analysis and decision making, such as improvements in medical diagnostics or autonomous driving. What makes these technologies different is the 'control' aspect, i.e. processes can be conducted without human intervention. This requires a significant and careful consideration of ethical and societal concerns - what is suitable for A/IS to handle, where do we need human intervention. It is critical to proactively address these questions and develop standards and other practices to guide the different actors, from A/IS creators, operators, users, and others. In this session we will discuss the seminal work laying out key principles and explore how to take the principles to practice. We invite you to participate in an interactive workshop session to address specific examples.

Speakers: Moira S. Patterson, AJung Moon, Maike Luiken, Beth-Anne Schuelke Leech.

Help to Shape Machine Intelligence and Ethics in Alberta (Amii)

The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) is home to some of the world's top talent in machine intelligence. We're an Alberta-based research institute that pushes the bounds of academic knowledge and guides business understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Machine Intelligence as a technology has the power to create meaningful impact on society and our environment. For this to happen the companies and individuals involved in developing and using machine intelligence must have ethics at the centre of their work. Join us in this exciting workshop to help shape the creation of an ethical framework that Amii will use with our collaborators, academics and business professionals alike. This framework will be at the heart of how Amii works with individuals and organisations and will be available for anyone to use.

Speakers: Almin Surani, Victor Silva.

Integrating Ethical Dimensions into your Product Development Cycles (ATB Financial)

ATB will share what they've learned in their approach of developing ATB's Ethical AI Framework, in addition to stimulating conversation and gathering an understanding of the diverse Albertan sentiment on these complex ethical components. The goal of the workshop is to help Albertan business owners understand the foundational components of Ethical AI, to be able to design their own frameworks in their respective companies.

Speakers: Chandra Rink and Bettina Berendt.

Data Ethics: The Public and the Private (Digital Scholars Lab)

From social media to smart cities, from online searches and purchases to political engagements and streaming entertainment, we all leave behind us increasingly large trails of data. This panel brings together five experts who will discuss the ethical line between our private selves and our increasingly public lives. Access to more data improves the ability of communities to make smart decisions, but it also exposes citizens to various kinds of surveillance that they might prefer to avoid. This panel takes a sophisticated look at the trade-offs we negotiate when living in an era of Big Data.

Speakers: Harvey Quamen, Katrina Ingram, Roman Eisner, Ben Gready, Karen Parker, Kris Joseph.

AI Student Un/Conference (*restricted to students only)

Please visit the AI Student Un/Conference page for more information.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the Humanities (*restricted to faculty members and students only)

The Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the Humanities workshop will be presented in three parts. Part 1 will involve setting up and running AI related code of which will be text-based. Part 2 will walk through some AI code and its output in detail. Part 3 will involve a discussion on the considerations of the ethical implications of what is demonstrated. Participants who want to follow along will need their own machine.

Facilitator: John Simpson, Chris Want.