Artificial intelligence (AI) will transform the way people and computers share their work. In the case of very large, complex or heterogeneous datasets, machine learning techniques help to facilitate solutions to previously unsolvable challenges. This transformation opens up huge potential in research, development and start-ups. In principle, AI methods can be applied to all research disciplines and sectors.
Interest was thus correspondingly high when the ETH AI Center and ETH Entrepreneur Club invited participants to a full-day double event (with Covid certificates required from attendees) at StageOne event hall in Oerlikon on 15 October. Both the AI+X Summit and Launch by ETH Entrepreneur Club focused on discussion and networking among basic researchers, specialists and start-up founders. Illustrating the versatility of AI, the ETH research projects ranged from control of swimming robots and road traffic to applications for sustainable nutrition and monitoring of COVID-19. In the process, they also raised some ethical questions we need to ask ourselves as a society. What, for example, will it take to make us trust AI in areas such as medicine? And how can we separate fact from fiction in the virtual domain?
More than 100 researchers at the ETH AI Center
A systematic and creative use of this diversity, which often arises at the interface between the disciplines, is a declared goal of the ETH AI Center, as its chair Andreas Krause explained in the summer (see
ETH News, 1 July 2021
). New interdisciplinary connections point the way to innovative and useful AI systems that are reliable, trustworthy and widely accessible, and which do not exclude anyone unfairly.
For exactly a year now, the ETH AI Center has fostered interdisciplinary exchange and facilitated networking among AI researchers at ETH and more widely (see
ETH press release, 20 October 2020
). With 29 professorships participating at the start, the research centre now comprises 102 professors –
almost a fifth of all ETH professorships
– as of last week. The 100
th
member of the ETH AI Center is Judit Szulágyi, Professor of Computational Astrophysics.
“AI will have an impact on every sector and aspect of our lives. This is why we want to bring science, industry and start-ups together to actively shape our future,” says Alex Ilic, managing director of the ETH AI Center. Together with the ETH Foresight Hub, the ETH AI Center organised the
AI+X event series
call_made
last year, which culminated in the AI+X Summit on Friday. More than 900 representatives from industry and research discussed the possibilities of AI application in areas such as climate change, industrial production and retail trade, data protection and privacy, automation of legal activities, and engineering, construction, architecture and art.
