AI professionals need to work to “diminish the misuse of AI at every layer from product teams to core technology,” said Cristian Canton, head of Facebook’s AI Red Team specialising in discovering, understanding and mitigating potential threats posed to businesses using Artificial Intelligence, on the second day of the AI & Big Data Congress. This will enable us to “pave the way to a better future that only technology can build.”
Canton believes this can be done by taking a holistic view of AI development, i.e. “investing in the people who build the algorithms and verifying the data we use to train the AI and the algorithms, as this shapes how the AI applications will behave.”
“We know that attackers are increasingly trying to confuse and bypass the machine learning system,” he added. As part of Facebook’s AI Red Team, “we test and stress our own AI systems to stay ahead of external attackers and better understand vulnerabilities and blind spots” which “allows us to adapt and scale up more quickly, broadly and effectively to proactively address challenges.”
“The presentations by the experts at the AI & Big Data Congress have made it clear that Artificial Intelligence is a hot technology with outstanding applications in a range of economic sectors,” said Marco Orellana, manager of the Centre of Innovation for Data tech and Artificial Intelligence (CIDAI). “This means businesses and especially SMEs need to start analysing their data, something we are working on at CIDAI to fast-track Artificial Intelligence uptake in Catalonia.”
The congress’s second day also featured a session on Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) which addressed quantum computing’s potential in AI with a look at the state of the art in research and building synergies between the two domains. The session was introduced by Adan Garriga, director of Audiovisual Technologies at Eurecat, and featured Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) researcher Adrián Pérez and SDG Group specialist Iraitz Montalbán.
Deep learning and reinforcement learning were discussed by Mario Martín, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the UPC, BSC; Ernest Valveny, a researcher in the CVC’s Document Analysis group and AI degree coordinator at the UAB; Josep Escrig, director of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data at the i2CAT Foundation; Judit Giró Benet, co-founder and CEO of The Blue Box Medical Solutions, and Juan B. Pedro Costa, co-founder and CTO of EarthPulse. They shared several applications of both techniques ranging from multimodal deep learning technologies for unlocking smart documents to a medical device under development aimed at home breast cancer testing by analysing a urine sample on a device.
The AI & Big Data Congress also addressed explainable Artificial Intelligence, i.e. the interpretation and understanding of black box models which brings numerous application insights and conceptualisation advantages, and showcased successful benchmark proofs of concept in sectors such as mobility, energy and sustainability, cultural and creative industries and agri-food.
CIDAI is a public-private partnership coming under the Catalan Government’s Catalonia.AI strategy and is coordinated by Eurecat. It involves the Catalan Government’s Ministry of the Vice-Presidency and Digital Policies and Territory; Barcelona City Council; the Barcelona Supercomputing Center; the Computer Vision Centre; everis, an NTT DATA Company; the i2CAT Foundation; Microsoft; the SDG Group; the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (IDEAI) at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia · BarcelonaTech (UPC) and Eurecat.
CIDAI supports generating, validating and transferring reliable Artificial Intelligence technologies with high added value to foster technology uptake and innovation in the country’s strategic sectors and its businesses and institutions as well as sharing these technologies and best practices with society at large.
The AI & Big Data Congress is an event organised by CIDAI and coordinated by Eurecat. It is sponsored by the Government of Catalonia, Barcelona City Council, the SDG Group, Microsoft, everis, an NTT DATA Company, and CaixaBank.
