What do young people think about artificial intelligence (AI)? Two young experts in artificial intelligence (AI) heard at the Business conference dedicated to the topic believe that the The topic should be a “priority” on the political agenda and calls for public policies more focused on “unlocking” the economic potential of artificial intelligenceso that knowledge and innovation are not hindered.
In a panel dedicated to young people who are driving AI at the Business conference “The Power of Making It Happen 2.0”, Catarina Farinha, AI Research Manager at Unbabel Labs, and Mafalda Rebordão, economist and specialist in artificial intelligence, They recounted their experience with AI and talked about the challenges faced in political, economic and social terms.
With a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico and a PhD in Computational Psychiatry from the University of Lisbon, Catarina Farinha works with AI “even before the current boom”. “You need to be a little careful not to stop innovation, but also to guarantee results“, he argues.
At Unbabel, AI is used to perform automatic and “intelligent” translation for the client, which adapts the language to existing cultural differences, with Language Operations (LangOps). Furthermore, Catarina Farinha is directly involved in the “Halo” project, which aims to “literally give a voice” to patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, allowing these people to speak and write despite the disease and its inherent disabilities.
Unbabel is the leader of the Responsible AI consortium, which will invest 75 million euros under the Recovery and Resilience Plan. In this sense, Catarina Farinha considers that it is “fundamental for innovation” to have greater proximity between companies and academiawith “industry leaders who bring the problems, academia who solve the big questions and startups who sell or make their product and bridge the gap between academia and industry leaders.”
In terms of public policies, he argues that “you need to have the conditions to develop your activity in the most agile and responsible way possible”. The biomedical engineer argues that there is a need for “responsibility, respectuality, privacy and guaranteeing guidelines to ensure that people can do this in the simplest way possible, but with the necessary barriers”.
On the other hand, Mafalda Rebordão, economist and specialist in artificial intelligence, considers that it is necessary to “create the necessary conditions so that AI becomes a priority topic”. The young woman would have started working with AI at Google, when she was in a “more commercial” area. “He constantly made pitches to clients for tools that used artificial intelligence”, such as Google Maps, Google Earth, etc., he explained. Now that he has left the technology giant, he is something of an activist for the good use of AI.
According to the economist, European Union (EU) policies on AI have focused on “regulating the market rather than regulating the product”. “There are people who consider that Europe is far ahead of North America, because it managed to publish documents – in fact there are 459 pages that are very difficult to digest on how the market was going to be regulated”, he said, noting that the first pages are “used to define AI.”
For Mafalda Rebordão, It is important that public policies go “beyond regulation”which is just a part” of what needs to be done. The young expert considers that it is also necessary to promote greater literacy “it is not just about who the user is, that is, who uses the technology, or the people who can develop technology , is also for those who think about the public aspect”.
The democratization of chatGPT has, according to the economist, brought about “a series of debates” about the good use of AI, namely “whether people will lose their jobs” and who is responsible in case of errors. “The output is always the responsibility of the human. And this is something that has to be clear in public policies. It is something that should be, in my opinion, regulated”, he said.
Mafalda Rebordão gave Santarém Hospital as an example, where a test was carried out in which they used the chatbot to carry out the screening. “The idea was to understand whether the chatbot was more effective than traditional screening. The reality is that more than 60% of people preferred the chatbot, because it was a much faster method”, he noted.
The young woman also highlighted that “extraordinary things are already being done in Portugal, although we always think that there is much more involved abroad”. “There are a lot of startups and people working in this area,” he said.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
