Human-centric Artificial Intelligence: 2nd French-German-Japanese Symposium

The symposium closed with impressive numbers: 100 speakers from all three countries, more than 1,000 registrations and over 4 million impressions on social media. On the last day, the participants spontaneously published a joint statement on “AI Collaboration Aimed at Tackling Planetary-scale Problems in the Anthropocene”.

Over the five days, a variety of AI-related topics were covered with high-ranking officials introducing each country’s national AI strategy, and an international panel discussed the question of the concrete implications of “Human-centric AI”. Further plenary sessions took up the topics of “Trustworthy AI”, “AI & Covid-19”, “Geopolitics of AI” and promising AI startups joined a pitching session. The symposium also featured a kick-of event, launching nine trilateral research projects to be jointly funded by the agencies: ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche; France), DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; Germany) and JST (Japan Science and Technology Agency; Japan). Each session was recorded online.

Participants could also choose to attend three of nine parallel sessions on environmental topics (AI & Agriculture, AI & Risk Prevention, Frugal AI), social topics (AI & Democracy, AI & Law, AI & Education) and technical topics (AI & Health Care, HPC, Human-Machine Interaction).

The symposium was a follow-up to the “1st Japanese-German-French DWIH symposium on Artificial Intelligence” initiated by DWIH Tokyo and co-organised by the French Embassy in 2018.