Aula Fellows presented a pre-workshop on asking hard questions on AI. Participants practiced identifying key chaarceristics of hard questions and discussing them together. During the conference that followed, several participants stood and asked hard questions, and several presenters were very happy to receive support and feedback on their most pernicious problems. We were able to build on existing collaborations and continue with or bridge-building between all the people and the people in decision-making roles on AI in society.
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Research Topic
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Unveiling AI Concerns for Sub-Saharan Africa and its Vulnerable Groups
In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), artificial intelligence is still in its early stages of adoption. To ensure that the already existing class imbalance in SSA communities does not hinder the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals, such as data security, safety, and equitable access to AI technologies, acceptable reliability measures must be put in place (as policies). This paper identifies some of the vulnerabilities in AI and adds a voice to the risks and ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI and its impact on SSA and its vulnerable groups. Our systematic literature review of related research between January 2014 and June 2024 shows the current state of AI adoption in SSA and the socio-political challenges that impact its development, revealing key concerns in data Governance, safety privacy, educational and skill gaps, socioeconomic impacts, and stakeholder influence on AI adoption in SSA. We propose a framework for designing data governance policies for the inclusive use of AI in SSA.
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The missing voices at AI conferences
Policymaking should be a society-wide effort, including elected officials, government employees, academics, business leaders, civil society groups and individuals. In theory, each of us should be able to participate.
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BrainStat: A toolbox for brain-wide statistics and multimodal feature associations
Analysis and interpretation of neuroimaging datasets has become a multidisciplinary endeavor, relying not only on statistical methods, but increasingly on associations with respect to other brain-derived features such as gene expression, histological data, and functional as well as cognitive architectures. Here, we introduce BrainStat – a toolbox for (i) univariate and multivariate linear models in volumetric and surface-based brain imaging datasets, and (ii) multidomain feature association of results with respect to spatial maps of post-mortem gene expression and histology, task-based fMRI meta-analysis, as well as resting-state fMRI motifs across several common surface templates. The combination of statistics and feature associations into a turnkey toolbox streamlines analytical processes and accelerates cross-modal research. The toolbox is implemented in both Python and MATLAB, two widely used programming languages in the neuroimaging and neuroinformatics communities. BrainStat is openly available and complemented by an expandable documentation.
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Public Consultation: AI & Copyright, Canada
This white paper is a response to Industry Canada’s public call for expert consultation on AI and Copyright. The consultation had specific questions, which are reproduced with our
answers, below. -
fMRIflows: A Consortium of Fully Automatic Univariate and Multivariate fMRI Processing Pipelines
One of the most significant current discussions in the understanding of the human brain is the functional recruitment of some regions of the cortex for specific tasks, regardless of the sensory modality (e.g. visual, tactile or auditory) in which the stimuli is received. The ability to perceive motion, among other visual properties, is a fundamental faculty of the human brain. Brain lesions that impair the detection and processing of motion have a profound impact on daily activity. Consequently, visual motion processing is one of the most fundamental and well-studied systems in the human brain, canonically known to develop mainly for the purpose of visual perception. A great deal of study on the multisensory responses to motion processing in the human brain focused on the middle temporal complex and superior temporal sulcus. Several studies using both neurophysiological and neuroimaging techniques showed the multisensory properties of these areas, showing their recruitment during both tactile and auditory motion stimulation. Despite the large amount of study on the topic it is still unclear whether the recruitment of these areas directly mediates the perception of motion through the different sensory input or regulates responses within primary sensory areas involved in the task. This MSCA fellowship allowed me to lay the foundations on the neural substrate underlying multisensory motion perception. We discovered that hMT+, an area mainly involved in visual motion processing, encode motion via spatial features of the stimulation rather than its intrinsic speed and our preliminary results show that, together with other visual areas, is able to decode speed via auditory and tactile motion stimulation, proving its multisensory function.
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Travailleurs du savoir, l’IA changera votre quotidien
Les professionnels et les travailleurs du savoir, en particulier ceux qui n’ont pas encore utilisé l’intelligence artificielle (IA), peuvent être enclins à avoir de fausses idées qui masquent l’ampleur des perturbations à venir.
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Strengthening Data Protection: Ensuring Privacy and Security for Nigerian Citizens
This Policy Brief examines the existing data protection regime both in Nigeria and globally and suggests ways to improve the data protection efforts in Nigeria. It considers Nigeria’s principal data protection laws, generally applicable across all sectors (including public and private institutions). By examining and juxtaposing some of the exemptions in legislation, an opportunity for abuse of data subjects’ rights may have been inadvertently created by laws that were enacted to do otherwise. This Policy Brief proffers preferable outcomes that may guide engagement with policymakers to rectify this situation.
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Do They Really Care about Us? On the Limits of State Intervention
This paper examines the limits of state intervention through the relationship between freedom and equality, the rule of law and social justice, as well as through two highly contradictory concepts regarding the scope of government action – the concepts of minimal state and paternalistic state. Accordingly, we seek to identify a model capable of outlining the extent to which the state can intervene in the light of socially beneficial goals, but without compromising individual freedom. Since we cannot find such a model within the extreme positions of liberalism and socialism, this paper seeks to offer a satisfactory solution by mitigating some of the ideologically exclusive positions. It embraces Aristotle’s teaching about the middle as a virtue and proposes sophisticated neoliberalism as a potential alternative to the status quo. Still, as insisted, the government should never be allowed to assume uncontrollable powers and create conditions for collectivist doctrines that recognize no individual freedom.
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Several presentations, including “Taking the Lead in SWE: An Asian Perspective.”
Dr. Bhaduri will be presenting at the Society of Women Engineers, with whom she is a Senator. Several events are online for interested persons. Dr. Bhaduri is an accomplished technologist and educator, as well as being excellent speaker and is appreciated for her wit, her precision, and her kindness.
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Does “Fortress Europe” have an alternative? EU member states between solidarity and national interests
This paper examines the repercussions of the 2015 European migrant/refugee crisis, which culminated with the 2018 dispute between Italy and France. It is concerned with the Dublin Regulation and the New Pact on Asylum and Migration, which are critical to the division and consequent polarizations across the EU. The Member States’ failure to show solidarity and agree to share the burden in relation to the distribution of immigrants and asylum seekers has brought the European integrationist project into question. In addition to considering the general theoretical explanations, the paper also looks into the African-origin migration/displacement as a proper trigger of widespread disagreements among European governments. The deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the local inhabitants – largely through the use of the French Treasurytied Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) franc – exposes the neo-colonial nature of the current practices and thus jeopardizes all those discourses and policy initiatives focused on the provision of peace and stability.
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Using Science to Support and Develop Employees in the Tech Workforce—An Opportunity for Multidisciplinary Pursuits in Engineering Education
The majority of students who choose to major in engineering do so to become a part of the community of practice of professional engineers (Johri & Olds, 2011), meaning that they want to have adequate exposure to what a career as a professional engineer could potentially be as part of their college experience. However, according to Jonassen (2014), engineering graduates are not well trained to contribute to the workplace due to the complexities associated with engineering work. Stevens, Johri, and O’Connor (2014) described engineering work as that which involves complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions. Since developing the skills for innovation involves analysis of complex, ambiguous, ill-defined, real-world problems (Daly, Mosyjowski, & Seifert, 2014; Newell, 2010), students must have an opportunity to, at the very least, be exposed to multidisciplinary teams. This emphasis on the need for exposure to multi-disciplinary problem solving holds true not only for undergraduate engineers in training, but also for graduate students focused on engineering education.