For a Human-Centered AI

“The new frontiers of artificial intelligence”

June 6, 2022

At the Trento Festival of Economics the meeting with Fondazione Bruno Kessler president Francesco Profumo and journalist Gerardo Graziola

TRENTO FESTIVAL OF ECONOMICS – A conversation on artificial intelligence, increasingly present in our lives, with a look at future prospects.

TThe event was held as part of the Trento Festival of Economics on Saturday, June 4, in the Depero Room in the Palazzo della Provincia, with Francesco Profumo, former Minister of Education, University and Research, and currently president of Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Compagnia di San Paolo and ACRI, and Gerardo Graziola, journalist with Il Sole 24 Ore, Radiocor.

In addition to offering a brief history on the evolution of AI – from Alan Turing‘s pioneering studies through the definition of the term in the 1950s to the present day – Profumo focused on the new frontiers of this field. At the center of the talk was the integration of data-driven learning-based techniques with model-based ones, leading to what is known as “Integrative AI,” precisely because it exploits the advantages of both types of approaches. There was no shortage of examples on the future applications of this powerful tool, for example, in the areas of Industry 4.0, for sustems predictive maintenance, and in the field of health, for disease risk prediction.

“The frontier of research on artificial intelligence will go even further,” Profumo stressed, answering Graziola’s questions.  “The challenge for future AI is to overcome the complexity barrier needed to address real-world problems, where people and machines have to coexist and are part of the same ecosystem, and where problems cannot be easily broken down into sub-problems that can be addressed separately. A change in paradigm is needed. We need a highly interdisciplinary approach oriented to theories and techniques that will integrate different scientific methods, technologies and skills. It will lead to the so-called generative Artificial Intelligence, which, in addition to learning from data, can create new data, produce artifacts, and carry out new scenarios, for example, on the phenomena of major global challenges, such as climate change, energy usage, and the evolution of pandemics.”

 


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