Tag Archives: XPRIZE Foundation

Media registration for United Nations 3rd AI (artificial intelligence) for Good Global Summit

This is strictly for folks who have media accreditation. First, the news about the summit and then some detail about how you might accreditation should you be interested in going to Switzerland. Warning: The International Telecommunications Union which is holding this summit is a United Nations agency and you will note almost an entire paragraph of ‘alphabet soup’ when all the ‘sister’ agencies involved are listed.

From the March 21, 2019 International Telecommunications Union (ITU) media advisory (Note: There have been some changes to the formatting),

Geneva, 21 March 2019
​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Artificial Intelligence (AI) h​as taken giant leaps forward in recent years, inspiring growing confidence in AI’s ability to assist in solving some of humanity’s greatest challenges. Leaders in AI and humanitarian action are convening on the neutral platform offered by the United Nations to work towards AI improving the quality and sustainability of life on our planet.
The 2017 summit marked the beginning of global dialogue on the potential of AI to act as a force for good. The action-oriented 2018 summit gave rise to numerous ‘AI for Good’ projects, including an ‘AI for Health’ Focus Group, now led by ITU and the World Health Organization (WHO). The 2019 summit will continue to connect AI innovators with public and private-sector decision-makers, building collaboration to maximize the impact of ‘AI for Good’.

Organized by the International Telecommunication Union (IT​U) – the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technology (ICT) – in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and close to 30 sister United Nations agencies, the 3rd annual ​AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, 28-31 May, is the leading United Nations platform for inclusive dialogue on AI. The goal of the summit is to identify practical applications of AI to accelerate progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals​​.​

►►► MEDIA REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN ◄◄◄

Media are recommended to register in advance to receive key announcements in the run-up to the summit.

WHAT: The summit attracts a cross-section of AI experts from industry and academia, global business leaders, Heads of UN agencies, ICT ministers, non-governmental organizations, and civil society.

The summit is designed to generate ‘AI for Good’ projects able to be enacted in the near term, guided by the summit’s multi-stakeholder and inter-disciplinary audience. It also formulates supporting strategies to ensure trusted, safe and inclusive development of AI technologies and equitable access to their benefits.

The 2019 summit will highlight AI’s value in advancing education, healthcare and wellbeing, social and economic equality, space research, and smart and safe mobility. It will propose actions to assist high-potential AI solutions in achieving global scale. It will host debate around unintended consequences of AI as well as AI’s relationship with art and culture. A ‘learning day’ will offer potential AI adopters an audience with leading AI experts and educators.

A dynamic show floor will demonstrate innovations at the cutting edge of AI research and development, such as the IBM Watson live debater; the Fusion collaborative exoskeleton; RoboRace, the world’s first self-driving electric racing car; avatar prototypes, and the ElliQ social robot for the care of the elderly. Summit attendees can also look forward to AI-inspired performances from world-renowned musician Jojo Mayer and award-winning vocal and visual artist​ Reeps One

WHEN: 28-31 May 2019
WHERE: International Conference Centre Geneva, 17 Rue de Varembé, Geneva, Switzerland

WHO: Over 100 speakers have been confirmed to date, including:

Jim Hagemann Snabe – Chairman, Siemens​​
Cédric Villani – AI advisor to the President of France, and Mathematics Fields Medal Winner
Jean-Philippe Courtois – President of Global Operations, Microsoft
Anousheh Ansari – CEO, XPRIZE Foundation, Space Ambassador
Yves Daccord – Director General, International Committee of the Red Cross
Yan Huang – Director AI Innovation, Baidu
Timnit Gebru – Head of AI Ethics, Google
Vladimir Kramnik – World Chess Champion
Vicki Hanson – CEO, ACM
Zoubin Ghahramani – Chief Scientist, Uber, and Professor of Engineering, University of Cambridge
Lucas di Grassi – Formula E World Racing Champion, CEO of Roborac

Confirmed speakers also include C-level and expert representatives of Bosch, Botnar Foundation, Byton, Cambridge Quantum Computing, the cities of Montreal and Pittsburg, Darktrace, Deloitte, EPFL, European Space Agency, Factmata, Google, IBM, IEEE, IFIP, Intel, IPSoft, Iridescent, MasterCard, Mechanica.ai, Minecraft, NASA, Nethope, NVIDIA, Ocean Protocol, Open AI, Philips, PWC, Stanford University, University of Geneva, and WWF.

Please visit the summit programme for more information on the latest speakers, breakthrough sessions and panels.

The summit is organized in partnership with the following sister United Nations agencies:CTBTO, ICAO, ILO, IOM, UNAIDS, UNCTAD, UNDESA, UNDPA, UNEP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNGP, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNICRI, UNIDIR, UNIDO, UNISDR, UNITAR, UNODA, UNODC, UNOOSA, UNOPS, UNU, WBG,  WFP, WHO, and WIPO.

The 2019 summit is kindly supported by Platinum Sponsor and Strategic Partner, Microsoft; Gold Sponsors, ACM, the Kay Family Foundation, Mind.ai and the Autonomous Driver Alliance; Silver Sponsors, Deloitte and the Zero Abuse Project; and Bronze Sponsor, Live Tiles.​

More information available at aiforgood.itu.int
​Join the conversat​ion on social media ​using the hashtag #AIforGood

As promised here are the media accreditation details from the ITU Media Registration and Accreditation webpage,

To gain media access, ITU must confirm your status as a bona fide member of the media. Therefore, please read ITU’s Media Accreditation Guidelines below so you are aware of the information you will be required to submit for ITU to confirm such status. ​
Media accreditation is not granted to 1) non-editorial staff working for a publishing house (e.g. management, marketing, advertising executives, etc.); 2) researchers, academics, authors or editors of directories; 3) employees of information outlets of public, non-governmental or private entities that are not first and foremost media organizations; 4) members of professional broadcasting or media associations, 5) press or communication professionals accompanying member state delegations; and 6) citizen journalists under no apparent editorial board oversight. If you have questions about your eligibility, please email us at pressreg@itu.int.​

Applications for accreditation are considered on a case-by-case basis and ITU reserves the right to request additional proof or documentation other than what is listed below. ​​​Media accreditation decisions rest with ITU and all decisions are final.

​Accreditation eligibility & credentials 
​1. Journalists* should provide an official letter of assignment from the Editor-in-Chief (or the News Editor for radio/TV). One letter per crew/editorial team will suffice. Editors-in-Chief and Bureau Chiefs should submit a letter from their Director. Please email this to pressreg@itu.int along with the required supporting credentials, based on the type of media organization you work for:

​​​​​Print and online publications should be available to the general public and published at least 6 times a year by an organization whose principle business activity is publishing and which generally carries paid advertising;
o please submit 2 copies or links to recent byline articles published within the last 4 months.

News wire services should provide news coverage to subscribers, including newspapers, periodicals and/or television networks;
o please submit 2 copies or links to recent byline articles or broadcasting material published within the last 4 months.

Broadcast media should provide news and information programmes to the general public. Inde​pendent film and video production companies can only be accredited if officially mandated by a broadcast station via a letter of assignment;
o please submit broadcasting material published within the last 4 months.

Freelance journalists and photographers must provide clear documentation that they are on assignment from a specific news organization or publication. Evidence that they regularly supply journalistic content to recognized media may be acceptable in the absence of an assignment letter and at the discretion of the ITU Corporate Communication Division.
o if possible, please submit a valid assignment letter from the news organization or publication.

2. Bloggers and community media may be granted accreditation if the content produced is deemed relevant to the industry, contains news commentary, is regularly updated and/or made publicly available. Corporate bloggers may register as normal participants (not media). Please see Guidelines for Bloggers and Community Media Accreditation below for more details:

Special guidelines for bloggers and community ​media accreditation

ITU is committed to working with independent and ‘new media’ reporters and columnists who reach their audiences via blogs, podcasts, video blogs, community or online radio, limited print formats which generally carry paid advertising ​​and other online media. These are some of the guidelines we use to determine whether to accredit bloggers and community media representatives:

​​ITU reserves the right to request traffic data from a third party (Sitemeter, Technorati, Feedburner, iTunes or equivalent) when considering your application. While the decision to grant access is not based solely on traffic/subscriber data, we ask that applicants provide sufficient transparency into their operations to help us make a fair and timely decision. If your media outlet is new, you must have an established record of having written extensively on ICT issues and must present copies or links to two recently published videos, podcasts or articles with your byline.​

Obtaining media accreditation for ITU events is an opportunity to meet and interact with key industry and political figures. While continued accreditation for ITU events is not directly contingent on producing coverage, owing to space limitations we may take this into consideration when processing future accreditation requests. Following any ITU event for which you are accredited, we therefore kindly request that you forward a link to your post/podcast/video blog to pressreg​@itu.int.

Bloggers who are granted access to ITU events are expected to act professionally. Those who do not maintain the standards expected of professional media representatives run the risk of having their accreditation withdrawn.

UN-accre​dited media

Media already accredited and badged by the United Nations are automatically accredited and registered by ITU. In this case, you only need to send a copy of your UN badge to pressreg@itu.int​to make sure you receive your event badge. Anyone joining an ITU event MUST have an event badge in order to access the premises. ​Please make sure you let us know in advance that you are planning to attend so your event badge is ready for printing and pick-up.​

You can register and get accreditation here (scroll past the guidelines). Good luck!

AI (artificial intelligence) for Good Global Summit from May 15 – 17, 2018 in Geneva, Switzerland: details and an interview with Frederic Werner

With all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI), a lot more attention seems to be paid to apocalyptic scenarios: loss of jobs, financial hardship, loss of personal agency and privacy, and more with all of these impacts being described as global. Still, there are some folks who are considering and working on ‘AI for good’.

If you’d asked me, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) would not have been my first guess (my choice would have been United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]) as an agency likely to host the 2018 AI for Good Global Summit. But, it turns out the ITU is a UN (United Nations agency) and, according to its Wikipedia entry, it’s an intergovernmental public-private partnership, which may explain the nature of the participants in the upcoming summit.

The news

First, there’s a May 4, 2018 ITU media advisory (received via email or you can find the full media advisory here) about the upcoming summit,

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now widely identified as being able to address the greatest challenges facing humanity – supporting innovation in fields ranging from crisis management and healthcare to smart cities and communications networking.

The second annual ‘AI for Good Global Summit’ will take place 15-17 May [2018] in Geneva, and seeks to leverage AI to accelerate progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and ultimately benefit humanity.

WHAT: Global event to advance ‘AI for Good’ with the participation of internationally recognized AI experts. The programme will include interactive high-level panels, while ‘AI Breakthrough Teams’ will propose AI strategies able to create impact in the near term, guided by an expert audience of mentors representing government, industry, academia and civil society – through interactive sessions. The summit will connect AI innovators with public and private-sector decision-makers, building collaboration to take promising strategies forward.

A special demo & exhibit track will feature innovative applications of AI designed to: protect women from sexual violence, avoid infant crib deaths, end child abuse, predict oral cancer, and improve mental health treatments for depression – as well as interactive robots including: Alice, a Dutch invention designed to support the aged; iCub, an open-source robot; and Sophia, the humanoid AI robot.

WHEN: 15-17 May 2018, beginning daily at 9 AM

WHERE: ITU Headquarters, 2 Rue de Varembé, Geneva, Switzerland (Please note: entrance to ITU is now limited for all visitors to the Montbrillant building entrance only on rue Varembé).

WHO: Confirmed participants to date include expert representatives from: Association for Computing Machinery, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Cambridge University, Carnegie Mellon, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Consumer Trade Association, Facebook, Fraunhofer, Google, Harvard University, IBM Watson, IEEE, Intellectual Ventures, ITU, Microsoft, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Partnership on AI, Planet Labs, Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, University of California at Berkeley, University of Tokyo, XPRIZE Foundation, Yale University – and the participation of “Sophia” the humanoid robot and “iCub” the EU open source robotcub.

The interview

Frederic Werner, Senior Communications Officer at the International Telecommunication Union and** one of the organizers of the AI for Good Global Summit 2018 kindly took the time to speak to me and provide a few more details about the upcoming event.

Werner noted that the 2018 event grew out of a much smaller 2017 ‘workshop’ and first of its kind, about beneficial AI which this year has ballooned in size to 91 countries (about 15 participants are expected from Canada), 32 UN agencies, and substantive representation from the private sector. The 2017 event featured Dr. Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal  (Université de Montréal) was a featured speaker.

“This year, we’re focused on action-oriented projects that will help us reach our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. We’re looking at near-term practical AI applications,” says Werner. “We’re matchmaking problem-owners and solution-owners.”

Academics, industry professionals, government officials, and representatives from UN agencies are gathering  to work on four tracks/themes:

In advance of this meeting, the group launched an AI repository (an action item from the 2017 meeting) on April 25, 2018 inviting people to list their AI projects (from the ITU’s April 25, 2018? AI repository news announcement),

ITU has just launched an AI Repository where anyone working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute key information about how to leverage AI to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

This is the only global repository that identifies AI-related projects, research initiatives, think-tanks and organizations that aim to accelerate progress on the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

To submit a project, just press ‘Submit’ on the AI Repository site and fill in the online questionnaire, providing all relevant details of your project. You will also be asked to map your project to the relevant World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) action lines and the SDGs. Approved projects will be officially registered in the repository database.

Benefits of participation on the AI Repository include:

WSIS Prizes recognize individuals, governments, civil society, local, regional and international agencies, research institutions and private-sector companies for outstanding success in implementing development oriented strategies that leverage the power of AI and ICTs.

Creating the AI Repository was one of the action items of last year’s AI for Good Global Summit.

We are looking forward to your submissions.

If you have any questions, please send an email to: ai@itu.int

“Your project won’t be visible immediately as we have to vet the submissions to weed out spam-type material and projects that are not in line with our goals,” says Werner. That said, there are already 29 projects in the repository. As you might expect, the UK, China, and US are in the repository but also represented are Egypt, Uganda, Belarus, Serbia, Peru, Italy, and other countries not commonly cited when discussing AI research.

Werner also pointed out in response to my surprise over the ITU’s role with regard to this AI initiative that the ITU is the only UN agency which has 192* member states (countries), 150 universities, and over 700 industry members as well as other member entities, which gives them tremendous breadth of reach. As well, the organization, founded originally in 1865 as the International Telegraph Convention, has extensive experience with global standardization in the information technology and telecommunications industries. (See more in their Wikipedia entry.)

Finally

There is a bit more about the summit on the ITU’s AI for Good Global Summit 2018 webpage,

The 2nd edition of the AI for Good Global Summit will be organized by ITU in Geneva on 15-17 May 2018, in partnership with XPRIZE Foundation, the global leader in incentivized prize competitions, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and sister United Nations agencies including UNESCO, UNICEF, UNCTAD, UNIDO, Global Pulse, UNICRI, UNODA, UNIDIR, UNODC, WFP, IFAD, UNAIDS, WIPO, ILO, UNITAR, UNOPS, OHCHR, UN UniversityWHO, UNEP, ICAO, UNDP, The World Bank, UN DESA, CTBTOUNISDRUNOG, UNOOSAUNFPAUNECE, UNDPA, and UNHCR.

The AI for Good series is the leading United Nations platform for dialogue on AI. The action​​-oriented 2018 summit will identify practical applications of AI and supporting strategies to improve the quality and sustainability of life on our planet. The summit will continue to formulate strategies to ensure trusted, safe and inclusive development of AI technologies and equitable access to their benefits.

While the 2017 summit sparked the first ever inclusive global dialogue on beneficial AI, the action-oriented 2018 summit will focus on impactful AI solutions able to yield long-term benefits and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. ‘Breakthrough teams’ will demonstrate the potential of AI to map poverty and aid with natural disasters using satellite imagery, how AI could assist the delivery of citizen-centric services in smart cities, and new opportunities for AI to help achieve Universal Health Coverage, and finally to help achieve transparency and explainability in AI algorithms.

Teams will propose impactful AI strategies able to be enacted in the near term, guided by an expert audience of mentors representing government, industry, academia and civil society. Strategies will be evaluated by the mentors according to their feasibility and scalability, potential to address truly global challenges, degree of supporting advocacy, and applicability to market failures beyond the scope of government and industry. The exercise will connect AI innovators with public and private-sector decision-makers, building collaboration to take promising strategies forward.

“As the UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies, ITU is well placed to guide AI innovation towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development ​Goals. We are providing a neutral close quotation markplatform for international dialogue aimed at ​building a ​common understanding of the capabilities of emerging AI technologies.​​” Houlin Zhao, Secretary General ​of ITU​

Should you be close to Geneva, it seems that registration is still open. Just go to the ITU’s AI for Good Global Summit 2018 webpage, scroll the page down to ‘Documentation’ and you will find a link to the invitation and a link to online registration. Participation is free but I expect that you are responsible for your travel and accommodation costs.

For anyone unable to attend in person, the summit will be livestreamed (webcast in real time) and you can watch the sessions by following the link below,

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/AI/2018/Pages/webcast.aspx

For those of us on the West Coast of Canada and other parts distant to Geneva, you will want to take the nine hour difference between Geneva (Switzerland) and here into account when viewing the proceedings. If you can’t manage the time difference, the sessions are being recorded and will be posted at a later date.

*’132 member states’ corrected to ‘192 member states’ on May 11, 2018 at 1500 hours PDT.

*Redundant ‘and’ removed on July 19, 2018.