The Montreal Artificial Intelligence Ethics Institute (MAIEI) announced a worldwide call for applications for its inaugural 2019-2020 MAIEI Fellowship. The multi-disciplinary program is an opportunity for researchers, software engineers, scholars, artists and other professionals in the fields of AI to promote their work on ethical and social aspects of artificial intelligence.
Potential topics of interested include social inclusion in AI, mission-driven AI, AI ethics in medicine, algorithms in politics, the malicious use of AI, embedding values into machines, algorithmic discrimination, algorithmic impact assessments, and data privacy and access controls, among others.
“A key differentiator of the MAIEI Fellowship is our focus on applied experiments,” says Renjie Butalid, co-founder of MAIEI. “We highly encourage field experiments that are driven by and for communities that will be impacted by AI. We believe that MAIEI Fellows will contribute to the creation and adoption of many technical and policy measures that address ethical, safety and inclusivity concerns in AI development.”
The fellowship is part of MAIEI’s commitment to encouraging responsible and ethical developments in the field of AI – an increasingly important priority on the agenda of various governmental and private organizations, with an European Commission committee having recently published a series of guidelines pushing for higher standards of ethical responsibility in the development of AI.
“MAIEI was founded to help define humanity’s place in a world increasingly characterized and driven by algorithms,” says Abhishek Gupta, founder of MAIEI. “Treating AI as inherently good overlooks the important research and development needed for ethical, safe and inclusive applications. Poor data, inexplicable code or rushed deployment can easily lead to AI systems that have a detrimental impact on society.”
Since its foundation in 2017, MAIEI has evolved into a movement of scientists, engineers and other professionals working to encourage technical and policy measures promoting ethical AI development.
Led by Gupta, the MAIEI community includes over 1,350 members and its impact includes public policy recommendations such as the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.
MAIEI Fellows are expected to gather in-person three times a year. The first gathering will be a on-week event held in Montreal in June 2019. The second and third gatherings, scheduled for November 2019 and April 2020, will be two-day engagements in cities to be announced.
MAIEI will shortly announce its academic, corporate and government partners, advisory board members and mentors for the 2019–2020 MAIEI Fellowship.
Deadline for applications is Sunday, March 3, 2019 at 11:59PM ET.
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