19th May 2023
The conference TRANSFORM 2023 took place in Bern, Switzerland in May 2023. The topic of the conference was the use of artificial intelligence in the public sector. Machine learning, chatbots, natural language processing and other methods based on artificial intelligence offer many opportunities but can contain also certain risks for public authorities.
Mascha Kurpicz-Briki, professor for data engineering at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and leader of the technical work package of the BIAS project, presented in the scientific session of the conference. In her talk, she illustrated how societal stereotypes can be encoded in word embeddings and language models. This is also highly relevant in the context of the BIAS project: one part of the debiaser tool developed in the project aims to detect and mitigate such biases.
She concluded her talk by mentioning why rather than the term artificial intelligence it might be better to use augmented intelligence. To make a responsible use of the new technologies, it is preferable to empower humans, and augment the human intelligence with smart tools, rather than replacing them.
Details about the event (in German):
https://www.bfh.ch/de/aktuell/fachveranstaltungen/transform-2023/
