ANJA KASPERSEN: Today's podcast will focus on artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and neurotechnologies. My guest today is Ricardo Chavarriaga. Ricardo is an electrical engineer and a doctor of computational neuroscience. He is currently the head of the Swiss office of the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe (CLAIRE) and a senior researcher at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Ricardo, it is an honor and a delight to share the virtual stage with you today. I am really happy and looking forward to a nice discussion today. ANJA KASPERSEN: Neuroscience is a vast and fast-developing field. Maybe you could start by providing our listeners with some background. When we think about the brain, this is something that has fascinated humanity for a long time. The question of how this organ that we have inside our heads can rule our behavior and can store and develop knowledge has been indeed one of the questions for science for many, many years. Neurotechnologies, computational neuroscience, and brain-machine interfaces are tools that we have developed to approach the understanding of this fabulous organ. When we talk about computational neuroscience it is the use of computational tools to create models of the brain. It can be mathematical models, it can be algorithms that try to reproduce our observations about the brain. It can be experiments on humans and on animals: these experiments can be behavioral, they can involve measurements of brain activity, and by looking at how the brains of organisms react and how the activity changes we will then try to apply our knowledge to create models for that. These models can have different flavors. We can for instance have very detailed models of electrochemical processes inside a neuron, and then we are looking at just a small part of the brain. We can have large-scale models with fewer details of how different brain structures interact among themselves, or even less-detailed models that try to reproduce behavior that we observe in animals and in humans as a result of certain mental disorders. We can even test these models using probes to tap into how can our brain construct representations of the world based on images, based on tactile, and based on auditory information.

ANJA KASPERSEN: Today I am very pleased to be joined by Pascale Fung. Pascale is a;rofessor in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is known globally for her pioneering work on conversational artificial intelligence (AI), computational linguistics, and was one of the earliest proponents of statistical and machine-learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP). She is now leading groundbreaking research on how to build intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans. I have really been looking forward to this conversation with you. Your professional accolades are many, most of which we will touch on during our conversation. However, for our listeners to get to know you a bit better, I would like us to go back to your upbringing during what I understand to be a very tenuous political period in China. I was born, spent my childhood, ...

As we edge closer to the end of a very eventful year, it seemed like a good time for a follow up to "12 Amazing Women in AI Ethics to Follow in 2018" post, which left out many deserving voices who are furthering the cause of Ethical and Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI). We live in very challenging times. The pervasiveness of bias in AI algorithms and autonomous "killer" robots looming on the horizon, all of which necessitate an open discussion and immediate action to address the perils of unchecked AI. The decisions we make today will determine the fate of future generations. Ethics in AI or Responsible AI is a broad evolving discipline that covers wide spectrum of critical issues facing humanity today, including how we can eliminate racial/gender inequities perpetuated by algorithmic biases to whether robots should have rights.

From answering queries to predicting future of your relationship, a lot is already being said and written about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We've seen movies depicting the technology like Matrix, and even Bollywood doesn't fall short of explaining what's AI, of course with a fair share of melodrama. But, what seems fascinating and equally scary is a new report talking about an AI arms race. An army of machines may be decades away, and Anja Kaspersen, Head of International Security, World Economic Forum, pointing at a survey of AI researchers by TechEmergence (via Medium) points out how it poses an array of security concerns which could be curbed by timely implementation of norms and protocols. There are many questions raised about how AI could be a life-changing and threatening factor, and what it is goes into the hands of some malicious minds.