Calanques, calanques [aka 40/40]

the true meaning of ABC

the Montréal declarAIon

In conjunction with Yoshua Bengio being one of the three recipients of the 2018 Alan Turing award, Nature ran an interview of him about the Montréal Déclaration for a responsible AI, which he launched at NeurIPS last December.

“Self-regulation is not going to work. Do you think that voluntary taxation works? It doesn’t.”

Reflecting on the dangers of abuse of and by AIs, from surveillance, to discrimination, but being somewhat unclear on the means to implement the ten generic principles listed there. (I had missed the Declaration when it came up.) I agree with the principles stressed by this list, well-being, autonomy, privacy, democracy, diversity, prudence, responsability, and sustainability, it remains to be seem how they can be imposed upon corporations whose own public image puts more restraint on them than ethics or on governments that are all too ready to automatise justice, police, and the restriction of citizen’s rights. Which makes the construction of a responsible AI institution difficult to imagine, if the current lack of outreach of the extra-national institutions is the gauge. (A striking coincidence is that, when  Yoshua Bengio pointed out that France was trying to make Europe an AI power, there was also a tribune in Le Monde about the lack of practical impact of this call to arms, apart from more academics moving to half-time positions in private companies.) [Warning: the picture does not work well with the dark background theme of this blog.]

instituts interdisciplinaires d’intelligence artificielle

Four French institutes have just been selected by [the jury mandated by] the French Government to become interdisciplinary institutes for artificial intelligence (3IA):

•    ANITI (Toulouse), centred at l’Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées
•    MIAI @ Grenoble Alpes (Grenoble), centred at l’Université Grenoble Alpes
•    PRAIRIE (Paris), centred à Inria
•    3IA Côte d’Azur (Nice), centred at l’Université Côte d’Azur

with Paris Dauphine, PSL Research University, a component of the third institute. (Where Prairie stands for PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research InstitutE.) This follows the “plan Villani“, launched by Cédric Villani to boost research in artificial intelligence in France and [possibly] slow down the brain drain of French IA researchers. With individual chairs attribued to each project, soon to be announced.

deep learning in Toulouse [post-doc position]

An opening for an ERC post-doc position on Bayesian deep learning with Cédric Févotte in Toulouse.

tenure track position in Clermont, Auvergne

My friend Arnaud Guillin pointed out this opening of a tenure-track professor position at his University of Clermont Auvergne, in Central France. With specialty in statistics and machine-learning, especially deep learning. The deadline for applications is 12 May 2019. (Tenure-track positions are quite rare in French universities and this offer includes a limited teaching load over three years, potential tenure and titularisation at the end of a five year period, and is restricted to candidates who did their PhD or their postdoc abroad.)

heart of Paris