A godfather of AI is among hundreds of tech bosses and academics calling for an international treaty to avoid the technology's'catastrophic' risk to humanity. On the eve of the AI Safety Summit, Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio has signed an open letter warning the danger it poses'warrants immediate and serious attention'. It cites a survey that found over half of AI researchers estimate there is more than a 10 per cent chance advances in machine learning could lead to human extinction. Notably, among the signatories is one of China's leading AI academics, Professor Yui Zeng, a key representative of Beijing who is set to lead one of the sessions at the event in Bletchley Park. Government officials may well see his backing as a positive signal that China – whose invitation to the summit has proven highly controversial – is willing to cooperate on international regulation.

The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent systems is a pan-European effort initiated in 2018 to foster European research excellence in machine learning and related fields. It aims to offer European researchers outstanding opportunities to carry out their research in Europe, and to nurture the next generation of European young researchers in this field of strategic importance. Its goal is to enable Europe to be competitive in modern AI and benefit from positive economic and societal impact. Today, ELLIS announces the establishment of the first 17 ELLIS units across 10 European countries and Israel. Built around outstanding AI researchers, the newly established research units are devoted to tackling fundamental challenges in AI with a focus on research excellence and societal impact.

Yoshua Bengio is recognised as one of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence and a pioneer in deep learning. Following his studies in Montreal, culminating in a PhD in computer science from McGill University in 1991, Professor Bengio did postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. In 2019, he was awarded the Killam Prize as well as the 2018 Turing Award, considered to be the Nobel prize for computing. These honours reflect the profound influence of his work on the evolution of our society. Yoshua Bengio is also known for collecting the largest number of new citations in the world in the year 2018.