Abstract

AI is disrupting all industry sectors from financial and healthcare, to transportation, logistics and manufacturing, and social media etc. With the rapid adoption of AI in the market place, there is an emerging debate on various ethical and legal challenges, as well as a pressing need for regulations and standardization. In this seminar, I will be presenting an overview of various international initiatives in promoting fair, ethical and transparent AI. I will also present various case studies about the ethical and legal challenges of AI applications, such as autonomous weapons, driverless cars, medical diagnosis, and social media influence, etc. We will discuss the questions raised in these applications and their pertinence to the future of AI regulation, standards and governance. The audience member will be invited to join the debate and discussions.

Speaker Biography

Pascale Fung is the Director of HKUST Center for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research center on top of all four schools at HKUST. She is a Professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science & Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC) and is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council of the World Economic Forum. She is an expert advisor on the United Nations panel on Autonomous Weapons and has been invited to advise the governments of the EU, Japan, India, UAE, etc. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society and is on the Advisory Board of Building Agile Governance for AI & Robotics (BGI4AI).