ECAI 2024 advocates for "public contribution" in AI and for research to have an "ethical and legal impact on the economy, people, and democracy"

Santiago de Compostela, October 24, 2024. The European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024) concluded its 27th edition, held from October 19 in Santiago de Compostela, with a call to the public sector to maintain financial "contributions" to research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a demand that the research community consider the "ethical and legal impact on employment, the economy, people, and democracies" in their works.

Senén Barro, scientific director of CiTIUS (Singular Research Center in Intelligent Technologies at the University of Santiago de Compostela) and president of the organizing committee of ECAI 2024, highlighted in his closing speech that the "scientific quality" of ECAI 2024 "has been exceptional." "In every sense, not only in the papers and posters presented, but also in the conferences and panels held here," he added.

Senén Barro expressed his "great satisfaction" with the many young participants, highly trained and enthusiastic about their research, as well as the "significant number of women, although there is still much to be done in this area to achieve the much-desired and necessary gender balance in AI."

However, the director of CiTIUS warned that "we will not be good researchers nor train new researchers well if we only focus on the scientific and technological aspects of AI, without also addressing its ethical, legal, employment, economic, human, and democratic impact..."

In this regard, he reminded everyone that the motto of ECAI 2024, "Celebrating the past, Inspiring the future", should invite us to "reflect" on the "journey made" over the past 50 years; not only because "it was necessary to get to where we are, but because if we ignore it, we will be doomed to repeat it, reinventing the wheel once again."

In this way, he emphasized that "this necessary past has been built, above all, under the protection of the public sector and its funding system." "Without having taken all these steps, there would be nothing today that would interest companies, nor anything that would allow them to develop innovative products, services, and applications, some even disruptive. Companies know that they are facing the most impactful and important technologies, after human language, of any we have ever developed," he asserted.

For this reason, he pointed out that "ECAI 2024 also wants to contribute its part in inspiring and building the future, and we want the public contribution to be decisive in that future." "We celebrate that our research has value and is brought to market by companies, but we do not want companies alone to lead the way to the future. Let us fight and mobilize our governments so that this is not the case," he concluded.

Expectations Surpassed

For his part, Carles Sierra, president of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), highlighted that ECAI 2024 reached a record number of participants, surpassing all previous editions. "It has been the largest ECAI edition we can remember, and therefore, it has far exceeded EurAI’s expectations," he added.

In his opinion, this edition of ECAI has helped "AI researchers from Europe and around the world"—one third of the attendees came from outside Europe—"share their latest results." He also pointed out that the works on different uses of language models, such as ChatGPT, have been "particularly relevant."

After four days of presenting research papers, scientific debates, and demonstrations, Carles Sierra believes that Europe is "strong in fundamental research but weaker in developing applications with impact." He acknowledged that "the transfer of research results into commercial products remains Europe’s pending task." Nevertheless, he predicts that the "EU will continue investing heavily in this technology, and the sector’s economic growth will be very significant in the coming years."

Positive Assessment

For his part, Alberto José Bugarín, coordinator of the CiTIUS Intelligent Systems Group and co-chair of the local organizing committee for the ECAI conference, gave a "positive assessment" of ECAI 2024, as it "positioned Santiago and Galicia at the center of AI at a global level" and allowed "debate on the latest results in areas such as language processing, social robotics, and computer vision."

Bugarín highlighted that the coincidence of this edition with the 50th anniversary of the ECAI conference was a "good moment to reflect on current issues such as responsible AI, the future of AI, and its impact," in addition to "doing so with knowledge, without unjustified alarms, and with the pause that important issues require."

Finally, he explained that organizing the event represented a "major effort and challenge" for CiTIUS, as more than 100 people were involved in the local organization to host over 1,600 AI researchers from around the world. "And we succeeded for the second time, which is the best indicator that we have a research group made up of excellent people, good researchers, and responsible individuals who can successfully carry out a challenge of this size," he concluded.

ECAI 2024

The European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024), held since October 19th in Santiago de Compostela, brought together over 1,600 participants from around the world, representing the global elite in Artificial Intelligence research. The event, supported by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), the Spanish Society for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA), and organized by CiTIUS (Singular Research Center for Intelligent Technologies at the University of Santiago de Compostela - USC), featured an extensive program with presentations of the latest scientific results, conferences, debate panels, workshops, and demonstrations to highlight AI’s contribution to the development of society.