Amir Banifatemi (XPrize) "AI for Good via Machine Learning Challenges"

"AI for Good" efforts (e.g., applications work in sustainability, education, health, financial inclusion, etc.) have demonstrated the capacity to simultaneously advance intelligent system research and the greater good. Unfortunately, the majority of research that could find motivation in real-world "good" problems still center on problems with industrial or toy problem performance baselines.

Competitions can serve as an important shaping reward for steering academia towards research that is simultaneously impactful on our state of knowledge and the state of the world. This talk covers three aspects of AI for Good competitions. First, we survey current efforts within the AI for Good application space as a means of identifying current and future opportunities. Next we discuss how more qualitative notions of "Good" can be used as benchmarks in addition to more quantitative competition objective functions. Finally, we will provide notes on building coalitions of domain experts to develop and guide socially-impactful competitions in machine learning.