AI and Sustainable Development

The focus on this panel is the use of AI for Sustainable Development and will explore the many opportunities this technology presents to improve lives around the world, as well as address the challenges and barriers to its applications. While there is much outstanding work being done to apply AI to such situations, too often this research is not deployed and there is a disconnect between the research and industry communities and the public sector actors. With leading researchers and practitioners from across the academic, public, UN and private sectors this panel brings a diversity of experience to address these important issues.

Audience members are invited to submit questions at: https://app.sli.do/event/skexhgej/live/questions

Facilitator: I am an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Speaker bio: Carla Gomes is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. Her research area is artificial intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning, optimization and machine learning. She is noted for her pioneering work in developing computational methods to address challenges in sustainability.

Dr. Miguel Luengo-Oroz is the Chief Data Scientist at UN Global Pulse, an innovation initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General. He is the head of the data science teams across the network of Pulse labs in New York, Jakarta & Kampala. Over the last decade, Miguel has built and directed teams bringing data and AI to operations and policy through innovation projects with international organizations, govs, private sector & academia. He has worked in multiple domains including poverty, food security, refugees & migrants, conflict prevention, human rights, economic indicators, gender, hate speech and climate change.

Thomas G. Dietterich: Dr. Dietterich is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of computer science at Oregon State University and currently pursues interdisciplinary research at the boundary of computer science, ecology, and sustainability policy.

Julien Cornebise is an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London. He focuses on putting Machine Learning firmly into the hands of nonprofits, certain part of certain, governments, NGOs, UN agencies: those who actually work on tackling our societies' biggest problems: . He built and until recently was a Director of Research of Element AI's AI for Good team, and head of its London Office. Prior to this, Julien was at DeepMind (later acquired by Google) as an early employee, where he led several fundamental research projects used in early demos and fundraising then co-created its Health Research team. Since leaving DeepMind in 2016, he has been working with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other actors. Julien holds an MSc in Computer Engineering, an MSc in Mathematical Statistics, and a PhD in Mathematics, specialized in Computational Statistics, from University Paris VI Pierre and Marie Curie and Telecom ParisTech. He received the 2010 Savage Award in Theory and Methods from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for his PhD work.