The third Tallinn Digital Summit was recently held in Tallinn with a focus on AI for public value and to mark the occasion we spoke to Dr Julien Cornebise, who leads AI for Good at Element AI. He is an awarded scientist who has worked with Amnesty International and he was an early employee at DeepMind. We talked about the hype around AI, but also the all the good it could be used for with the right incentives. We have a government team within Element AI and we've had some requests, but like every contact we get – whether it's from NGOs, agencies or governments – we make very sure to explain to the people who reach out to separate the hype from reality. In some cases, we've said that it's not feasible now, but maybe after a few more years of research. More generally, yes, we want to work with governments around AI for good, because the sustainable development goals are not just for NGOs.

You might think that anthropology and AI is an odd pairing. But in a 2017 article in WIRED, journalist James Temperton wrote, "For DeepMind to realise its ambition of cracking general intelligence, it needs an interdisciplinary approach to AI". As DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman explained in the same article, "We need to have in-house the very best anthropologists, sociologists…specialists on bias and discrimination in machine learning systems, working with both our researchers and applied software development teams so that they can give them feedback and guidance and introduce them to new modes of critical thinking". So in the spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, around 300 technologists working in AI (machine learning, data science, robotics, AI) and anthropologists and sociologists from around the world will come together at the Watershed on Bristol's historic harbourside to discuss human-centred AI. One of the keynotes, Dr Julien Cornebise, is from Element AI.