A Developer’s Responsibility and the Use of AI

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Due to rising cases related to COVID-19 in Santa Barbara County, we have changed this program to an online event. We made this decision in order to protect the health and safety of our guests, staff, board members, and sponsors. All who have pre-registered before January 5th will be fully refunded. We hope to have our in-person events soon!

VENTECH INVITES YOU TO A FREE VIRTUAL EVENT

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming an integral part of many organizations. When analyzing sales data, exploring market trends, optimizing supply chains, or designing personalized customer experiences, intelligent machines and computational algorithms have come to a point where they outperform humans. AI has changed the world as we know it – sparking change across all industries.

What do we need to do to use AI responsibly? How can we avoid biases, unfairness, or a lack of transparency? How do we need to work with intelligent machines without blocking our own learning? How can we use AI not only to optimize our current business processes but to improve inclusion and equity?

With a diverse set of speakers from academia and industry, we will discuss how to use AI responsibly and what we need to do now to ensure AI is expanding our capabilities in a sustainable way.

The program will be moderated by Heike Schirmer, Sr. Manager for Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa.

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SPEAKERS

WILLIAM WANG, Director, UCSB Natural Language Processing Group & Center for Responsible Machine Learning

William Wang is the Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Natural Language Processing Group and Center for Responsible Machine Learning. He has broad interests in Artificial Intelligence, including statistical relational learning, information extraction, computational social science, dialog & generation, and vision. He has published more than 100 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals and received several best paper awards. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community. His work and opinions appear at major tech media outlets such as Wired, VICE, Scientific American, Fortune, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.

 

ANDREAS FORSLAND, Founder & CEO, Cognixion

Andreas is the Founder & CEO of Cognixion, a digital health startup based in Santa Barbara, California, and Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Cognixion builds accessible and affordable neuroprosthetic software and wearables that use biometric sensors and ML in new ways to help people with complex disabilities use their face, eyes, and brain as a direct control interface for mobile and AR accessibility.

Cognixion is recognized as a top 21 neurotech startup to watch, and is focused on scaling up the transformation of over 100 million lives and translating universal design approaches for everyone by focusing on the most challenging human interaction needs.

MATT BEANE, Assistant Professor, TMP- UCSB, and Founding Executive, Humatics

Matt Beane is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Matt studies deviance in work involving machine intelligence – and specifically robotics. He does field research on work involving robots to help us understand the implications of intelligent machines for the broader world of work. He asks when, where, and how workers, organizations, and even AI defy norms and rules in the 21st century. Matt has done extensive field research in settings such as robotic pick and pack work in fulfillment centers, robotic surgery, robotic materials transport, and robotic telepresence in healthcare, elder care, and knowledge work.

He received his PhD from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Information Technologies department. His research on robotic surgery was published in 2019 at Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, his related TED talk has over 1.9 million views, and his work on robotic telepresence was published in 2014 in Organization Science. He was selected in 2012 as a Human Robot Interaction Pioneer, and is a regular contributor to popular outlets such as Wired, MIT’s Technology Review, TechCrunch, Forbes, and Robohub. Matt also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies to help found and fund Humatics, an MIT-connected, full-stack IoT startup.

 

MODERATOR

Heike Schirmer, Sr. Manager, Amazon/Alexa

Heike is a Product Manager for Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa where she is focusing on international expansion. She came to Amazon via the acquisition of Graphiq, a Santa Barbara based start-up, where Heike was Director of Product focusing on new products and new markets. Before Graphiq, Heike was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Munich. She consulted tech and public sector clients on organizational and strategic topics.

Heike obtained a PhD from the Free University Berlin, Germany, in the area of Social Entrepreneurship focusing on cross-sector partnerships. She also holds a Master’s Degree in Physics from the Technical University in Munich, Germany.

 

EVENT DETAILS