Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for People symposium

On 7th of October 2015, Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) showed a documentary program A studio in which artificial intelligence research and applications were discussed. In media it is commonplace to consider the dangers and risks related to intelligent machines. This time, however, the focus was in positive developments, in particular related to language processing and health care. Regarding the first, prof. Timo Honkela (on the left) was interviewed, and an expert view on health informatics was provided by Dr. Jaakko Hollmén (on the right). The TV programme is available in YLE Areena.

As the program gave a chance to discuss these issues only shortly, a symposium called "Artificial Intellgence and Machine Learning for People" was organized at the University of Helsinki on Monday 2nd of Novermber 2015. The symposium was organized in collaboration between experts from the University of Helsinki and the Aalto University.

Timo Honkela provided an overview in his talk "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Service of the Good. Professors Liisa Tiittula (University of Helsinki) and Mikko Kurimo (Aalto University) provided views on how to help people with disabilities to follow media. Tiittula as an expert in interpretation and Kurimo as an expert in speech technology described how modern technology can be made to create speech-to.text services, to facitate content description and to facilate communication in general in the case of various disabilties. Professor of language technology Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki) explained how advances in machine translation have made it possible to cross language borders. The coverage of the services have grown significantly thanks to the data driven approached used. Dr. Jaakko Hollmén (Aalto University) described methods used in intelligent data analysis based on machine learning. He used the health of the environment and of people as case studies. Dr. Krista Lagus (University of Helsinki) provided her insights on how data driven approaches can be used to promote wellbeing. Dr. Jorma Laaksonen (Aalto University) explained how machines that have vision can be used to help us.

Liisa Tiittula Mikko Kurimo Jörg Tiedemann Jaakko Hollmén Krista Lagus Jorma Laaksonen