This report makes our joint effort complete on reporting for both days ( the second and third) of the conference

This year Global Grand Challenges Summit takes place at London, UK from Sept 16-18. I was very lucky and honored to be invited by Prof. Yu-Chi Larry Ho to attend this meeting. The following is my takeaway from the conference.

One of the major topics of the summit is on concern how to make sure AI is doing good things for human beings. I learned a beautiful metaphor from Diane Greene （CEO，Google Cloud） that AI is just the bicycle of mind. So, it is very useful as long as it in control of the rider (human beings). It is general agreed that engineering systems with AI should always give control to human beings for ultimate authority, and should not keep human beings totally out of the decision loop.  As a result, it is also desirable to have AI as an assistant for human being to make decisions and the suggestions AI provided to human beings should be understandable, so that some kind of auditing could be done.  Dr Zhonghan Deng (from Vimicro Corporation) listed three possible future situations: AI benefits all, AI benefits few, and AI replaces all and he is optimistic for the future.  Professor Luciano Floridi (from University of Oxford) suggests that there are in general three aspects to ethical AI, namely, asking opinion of general public (including opinions from countries around the world), self-regulation and law. One concrete way to implement global consent in developing AI is through sharing of tools such as github.

In the summit, engineering education is commonly believed should be improved in the era of AI.  The summit invites young startup founders to share their experiences in helping Africa using engineering innovations. They demand more community oriented training instead of industrial orientedtraining in colleague level engineering education which I fully agree and is starting to practice in Tsinghua. It is hard for both teachers and students, but it seems necessary for the young generation to survive and for engineering schools to stay relevant.  

Qianchuan Zhao, CFINS, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

Sept 18, 2019