ECAI 2024 will turn Santiago de Compostela into the capital of the world's Artificial Intelligence elite

The European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024), which will be held from 19 to 24 October in Santiago de Compostela, will bring together more than 1,600 delegates representing the world's elite in Artificial Intelligence research to address the latest advances in research in the field, as well as the fundamental challenges that AI will have to face in the coming years, including areas such as regulation, ethical commitment, economic impact, and contributions to solving humanity's main problems.

The event, sponsored by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), the Spanish Society for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA) and organized by CiTIUS (Singular Center for Research in Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela - USC), includes an extensive program featuring the presentation of the latest scientific results, conferences, panel discussions, workshops, and demonstrations to highlight AI's contribution to society's development.

ECAI 2024, which has the slogan "Celebrating the past. Inspiring the future", marks the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the first European conference on AI, held in Brighton in 1974. "It is about recognizing decades of research in Artificial Intelligence to which Europe has made significant contributions, particularly through public efforts, which have been essential to reach where we are today, with an ever-growing impact that already affects all areas of our personal and professional lives," explained Senén Barro, director of CiTIUS and president of the organizing committee.

Fact-checking

After the official inauguration, which will be chaired by the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, Professor Iryna Gurevych (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany) will deliver a lecture on "real-world fact-checking with large linguistic models."

In her speech, she will present the advances made in "dismantling misleading narratives based on fallacious interpretations of scientific publications." She will also demonstrate how "large multimodal language models can be used to detect misinformation based on visual content."

For her part, researcher Yolanda Leite (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), will present research on how intelligent robotic systems accurately learn human intentions, informed by human knowledge, and how they address the challenge of over-relying on human feedback.

Under the suggestive title of Robots (Still) Need Humans in the Circuit, Professor Leite will argue that a deeper understanding of how these systems perceive, reason, and act within their social context can foster more natural and efficient human-robot interactions.

In the section on Frontiers in AI, María Vanina Martínez, from the Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence IIIA-CSIC, will present her research proposal titled Back to the Future: symbolic reasoning to combat the misuse of social networks.

Economic impact

ECAI 2024 will also pay special attention to the economic impact of AI, exploring its threats and opportunities through multiple formats. In one of the panels, Jeremy Rollison, director of EU Government Affairs, Microsoft Corporation; David H. Autor, professor in the Department of Economics at MIT; and Raquel Jorge, researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute, will address the "current and expected impact of AI on the global economy, as far as it can be predicted, with estimates changing almost daily due to the accelerated evolution of AI."

The discussion will focus on how AI is reshaping various sectors, examining economic growth forecasts, the technologies involved, regional and national differences, and the role of governments and industries. It will also delve into certainties and uncertainties about the possible emergence of an AI-driven economy, especially in relation to technological unemployment, job relocation, and the concentration of wealth and power in a few companies and countries.

For his part, researcher César A. Hidalgo (Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest) will present Economic Complexity: using machine learning to understand the past, present, and future of economic development, a talk in which he will reflect on new research on economic history and digital trade through the use of smart technologies.

In parallel, the Birds of a Feather section, which seeks to foster interaction among researchers from different areas of interest, promoting a multidisciplinary approach, will address Data-driven Venture Capital: strategies and tools to improve investment processes. The discussion will focus on tools and methodologies used to enhance deal flow, investor and company ratings, and portfolio management.

Another proposal in this section focuses on Leveraging AI to foster high-level development in emerging markets, a project that explores AI's transformative potential to overcome traditional barriers and accelerate economic growth and development, considering ethical implications, cultural impacts, economic feasibility, technological requirements, and regulatory considerations.

AI regulation

Moreover, ECAI 2024 includes a panel on AI Regulation: the European stage, which will analyze and discuss the European strategy for regulating AI and how to address the necessary oversight of AI-based systems, particularly those that carry higher risks.

Among the participants will be Kilian Gross, head of the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Policy Development and Coordination Unit (DG CNCT - EU), who will explore the European strategy for regulating AI, with a special focus on the recently approved AI Act, or European AI Regulation, and the supervisory model the EU is promoting, comparing it with regulatory frameworks adopted in other parts of the world.

The panel will also address the Design of Ethical and Trustworthy AI Research Policies for Horizon Europe, which aims to shed light on the EU's efforts to promote a human-centered and trustworthy AI research and development model from every perspective.

History and future

The Santiago de Compostela Conference will also offer a retrospective on 50 years of AI in Europe, with the participation of Luc Steels and Stefano Cerri, pioneers in AI research in Europe, and will pay tribute to key members of European AI research over the last few decades.

The "next 50 years of AI" will also be a topic of reflection at ECAI 2024, particularly in a special panel that will discuss the current path of research in the field, its possible future, and the main challenges it will have to face.

In addition to the scientific debate, ECAI 2024 will feature 44 demonstrations of innovative projects from October 21 to 23 at the Palacio de Congresos de Santiago, the conference venue. These demonstrations will showcase systems capable of displaying emotions to improve empathy, robots making critical real-time decisions, and methods to defend against AI systems designed to manipulate human behavior.

This will be the second time that the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is held in Santiago de Compostela, following the 2020 edition, which took place during the COVID pandemic and had to be quickly converted into an online event, becoming a pioneering fully digital event globally.

With regard to the upcoming edition, ECAI 2024 will be a record-breaking event, both in terms of the number of papers presented—exceeding 500—and the number of attendees and the relevance of its content. All of this will undoubtedly make Santiago de Compostela the world capital of Artificial Intelligence during the week of October 19-24.