Elsa Zhong, cohort 1, has recently returned from Vancouver, Canada where she attended the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024) which took place on February 20th-27th. She writes about the conference:
“I was delighted to present our work ‘Regulating AI: Applying Insights from Behavioural Economics and Psychology to the application of Article 5 of the EU AI Act‘ both via an oral presentation and via a poster presentation at the AAAI 2024. The work attracted a lot of attention. After my oral presentation, there was supposed to be only one question, but instead, four people were lined up at the microphone waiting to ask questions, and many others approached me afterwards!
There were many insightful and thought-provoking discussions. Academics from all over, including the UK and North America, were interested in exploring potential collaborations to adapt our work for specific domain applications, such as in the financial industry, or to conduct further research on the interactive effects of employing multiple manipulative techniques.
I had the chance to present our work and chat with Qiang Yang, an influential professor in the Chinese AI community, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the former general chair of AAAI and IJCAI president. I talked about launching AI ethics and regulation education and research in mainland China. He mentioned that this is a challenging yet fascinating career path and encouraged me to enjoy the journey and was happy to offer assistance. After the conference, I was also very honoured to be invited by the editors of AI magazine, which belongs to AAAI, to write a perspective on the EU AI Act based on our work presented at the conference, which will hopefully be released in the summer. I believe this piece of work has really laid the foundation for an area of work that I think can be widely explored in my future academic career.
The workshops and tutorials at AAAI were also fabulous; I met many people presenting their research, which was truly interdisciplinary, eye opening and very solid.”
You can view Elsa’s oral presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWPpHYwqpU8 and the poster is shown below:
