Can the diverse artificial intelligence (AI) community come together to build an infrastructure to advance the United Nation's sustainable development goals (SDGs, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs) around the world? Can global projects be developed that begin to address pressing issues surrounding some of our greatest humanitarian challenges to help all? Those were the goals of the second annual AI for Good Global Summit, the leading United Nations platform for dialogue on Artificial Intelligence held in Geneva, Switzerland, over three days in May. The conference was organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations' specialized agency for information and communication technology (ICT), in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and 32 sister UN agencies. The 500 attendees consisted of a diverse set of multi-stakeholders with wide-ranging expertise--from the individual UN agencies (including everything from UNESCO and UNICEF to The World Health Organization, The World Bank, and UNHCR), AI researchers, public- and private-sector decision-makers, potential financial partners and sponsor organizations.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform nearly every industry. This post is from a talk I've given a few times about how to think about data, scarcity and intelligence in order to understand what's unfolding. Part 1: Where We've Just Come From: The Big Data Business Model The neural network algorithms that modern artificial intelligence uses, the ones that drive trucks autonomously or detect cancer more accurately than humans, have been known and existed for decades. What have brought us to an inflexion point are the discovery of computers many orders of magnitude more powerful at executing the needed calculations, and, more importantly, the availability of large datasets to feed the algorithms. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the AI revolution is coming hot on the heels of the "Big Data" revolution that's been taking place over the last 10 years or so.