Prof. Dirk Helbing, ETHZ, Switzerland
Title
Towards Smarter Societies
Abstract
As the recent triumph of alphaGo has shown, the exponential increase in computer power allows us now to solve challenging problems that seemed to be out of reach for a long time. So, would we eventually be able to build superintelligent computers that would be able to solve humanities' 21st century problems and run our society in an optimal way? Surprisingly, the answer is “no”, because data volumes increase faster than processing power, and systemic complexity even faster. This has a number of implications: local knowledge, context as well as distributed computing and control will become more important. Science will be relevant again to decide what data to process and how, and how to collect the right kind of data in the first place. This talk will elaborate on a number of pitfalls in the areas of Data Science and AI, and it will make proposals how to use these technologies and the Internet of Things more successfully, with context-aware approaches.