TRANSCRIPT

00:00  In 2016 the unexpected happened, you all know what I’m talking about don’t you? Not only did the political scene in the United States of America take an unexpected turn overnight we also learned that the platform that was built to bring people together was now being weaponized against us,  challenging our political religious-cultural ethical, and social beliefs.

00:37 I was not happy, people were not happy. Fast forward to 2018 another historical event happened –  Cambridge Analytica. As a long-term marketer it was a wake-up call for me,  it was a wake-up call on how these so-called social media platforms, where we share and give important information about ourselves and our lives away willingly could not only be used unethically but could also cause us harm.  I also saw our youth on TikTok and Snapchat sharing every last detail about themselves, their names, their names of their friends, where they live,  what school they go to,  the name of the favorite ice cream shop, and how many times a week they go there; I heard myself saying enough is enough, I needed to do something.

01:37 I wanted to make people aware of the power they had and I wanted to give back this power to them I started DataEthics4All as a humble initiative, reaching out to anyone who would listen and agree that the use of data and art extends beyond the use of artificial intelligence and that ethics is needed for an end-to-end data governance strategy from data collection to data sharing.

02:07 I started thinking of ways on how we could educate our audience on their data power and control, we slowly started building a community of data ethics advocates and stewards when the unfortunate death of George Floyd happened.

02:27 I remember questioning myself and the global leaders of the data ethics for all community what can we do to protest against the racial injustice in society as technologists, we are aware that our lives are driven to a large extent by artificial intelligence systems and the problems we face today by using these systems in recruiting, banking and facial recognition even,  that’s what led to the ethics for next-gen AI hackathon, yes our AI systems are not perfect today but we want them to be for our next generation.

03:12

Mahatma Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world”

Since the best practice to create better AI systems is human oversight with cognitive diversity,  we set out to host a hackathon that will do just that. We chose the top three areas of artificial intelligence that affect our society the most today, criminal justice, predictive policing, and Covid 19 contact tracing.

We set out to invite leaders who are at the intersection of technology, data ethics policy, law, health care policymakers, policy keepers, marketing, AI research, and people who cared about social impact. Most hackathons encourage people to bring their tech friends and ideate over a weekend but we decided to do algorithmic matchmaking for teams to maximize cognitive diversity.

04:15 And here we are, 700 members, strong today celebrating our cognitive diversity tech for social good and building the next generation of inclusive AI systems that will create the long-term social impact, I’m so glad you’ve joined us in building ethical solutions for tomorrow and I’m excited to see their impact. Hello, everyone, my name is Shilpi Agarwal, founder of DataEthics4All and your host for the next four days, welcome to the Ethics4NextGen AI summit Bootcamp and Hackathon, let the festivities begin.