The Stanford campus has been buzzing this week over the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which kicked off here yesterday. This three-day event unites an estimated 1,500 entrepreneurs, academics and investors from around the world in a series of talks and panels designed to spark new ideas and partnerships.
As part of the summit, Stanford and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are presenting a panel discussion tonight to explore the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Among the featured experts at "The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Emerging Topics and Societal Benefit" will be bioengineer Russ Altman, MD, PhD, faculty director of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, and Fei-Fei Li, PhD, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab.
Want to know more? Earlier this week Altman, who is also a professor of genetics and medicine, provided a sneak peek of some of the things we'll likely hear about tonight:
This is a great opportunity for AI to help advance our understanding of health and disease. The ability to integrate data about patients from three streams - genomics, personal monitoring and electronic health records - to more accurately diagnose them and choose treatments is extremely exciting. But we need to make sure that these capabilities are distributed in a just way so that it does not just benefit a small fraction of society. Now is a good time to think about the anticipated evolution of these capabilities and how they might impact economic, social, political and cultural activities. There have been some naysayers and so there is also a sense that the public should get a balanced view of the benefits and costs of AI technology.
The panel discussion will be live streamed on Facebook and live tweeted by @StanfordEng beginning at 6:30 PM Pacific time; we'll also be sharing nuggets from the panel on @StanfordMed. You can read more about the summit's proceedings by following the hashtag #GES2016 on Twitter.
Previously: Did extraterrestrials chew up my news release, or does artificial intelligence still have a ways to go?, Can Joe Six-Pack compete with Sid Cyborg?, and Half-century climb in computer's competence colloquially captured by Nobelist Michael Levitt
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