 Thanks for joining us here in Geneva for WISIs Forum 2019, where a lot of the discussions are centered around ethics. To discuss it, I am joined by Mr. Konstantinos Gadahalios, his managing director at IEEE Standards. Konstantinos, thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure. And it is a very timely moment because we are really dealing with technologies that have a very big potential to improve our conditions of living on Earth. At the same time, they can be quite intrusive in our daily life. You're talking about artificial intelligence, aren't you? Because a lot of the discussions here at WISIs Forum are centered, like I've said, around this new technology. Yes. And I don't like to call it artificial intelligence because nobody knows exactly what it is. There is also a baggage related to this. For me, it is the new generation of computing systems with capacities and it is a tradition in computing. But still, there is something new emerging. And this makes it, it is the time now to think about the consequences before it is late. And in certain aspects, it is late. So we have to act. And I believe we have started years ago contemplating about this and we did not stay on contemplation. We created a global community. There are thousands of people now from all around the world who frame the issues in a very interesting way. What are we talking about if we mean transparency or accountability? What are the legal questions? What are the social implications of these technologies? And this is quite a bottom-up process of people who came together. They define what they're going to talk about. We don't tell them you do this. And they came out with a kind of, let's say, manifesto, which is called ethical align design. They have the pleasure here to be able to say that we launched the first edition. It is the third version, but it is the first mature edition. It is published a few days ago. And it is available online. Creative common-liceness. Everybody can take it and use it. And people are taking it and using it for many purposes. So it is a book, several hundreds of pages. But it is very well structured and people can take what they need. And we don't stay in the book. We're engaging in a series of standardization projects about how to define transparency for logarithmic systems. How to check for lack of undesired bias. And also about data quality. There is a lot of projects around data governance. Specific projects about children and their rights in the digital environment and the protection of their data. And we are working very closely also with legislators and regulators at certain countries who have gone quite far in the top-down from legislation and regulation. And we try to close the ranks with them to coming from bottom up with codes of conduct for the profession. And the age appropriate platforms for the internet and so on. So that these things can work in practice. And if we solve this problem, then we have addressed the needs and protecting the dignity of one-third of the global users of the internet. Of course. It's huge. So what do you advocate exactly in the book? What's the right approach to adopt? You mean generally we came up with a series of high-level principles. And many organizations have come up recently with many principles. And interesting, but ours are really, they came bottom up from what the global communities believe. We didn't give them. So for instance they say that principle number one should be to respect and promote and protect the internationally recognized human rights. This is number one. And we were probably the first who framed it this way. That this technology should respect our codified human rights. And this is not so trivial because most of the internet platforms really do not respect for instance the children rights, although they are codified. They just ignore them. They treat children as adults. So this is not so trivial what we are saying here. The second is about well-being. That means in a paradigm of corporate capitalism, which only a quick profit of the next quarter is really important, then these technologies are going to serve this. They are going to serve concentration of power and wealth, but not the well-being of broader groups or of humanity. So well-being is very important as a criterion for developing and applying these technologies. So the first two criteria are not technical. And then there are other, about data agency. I spoke about the intrudiveness of this technology. And this is extremely important because this is undermining democracy. This is happening as we are speaking. So we have to reclaim part of our agency over our digital identity. We must be able to exist online as we exist offline. It cannot be that in our physical life we feel free. In our digital life we are slaves because we do not control our identity anymore. Absolutely. There is a real sense of urgency, isn't there? Absolutely. We have to act now. Yesterday. Yesterday. There are people who say we don't care. But even now the people who gather the data come and say we need regulation. Please regulate ourselves. I don't want to name the names. But how credible is this? But still, even them realized the monsters they have created. So it is really necessary yesterday. But we have started yesterday. We are not ready yet with all these actions. But already now we are working together with governments, with municipalities and also with industry to help them understand what they are doing, assess the quality of their algorithmic systems and their data collections and also to be able to show this to the citizens or to the customers. Listen. We really have systems that do what we are supposed to do and not something else. So we are not cheating you. And there is a need. There is also a need of transparency and accountability towards also your users and citizens. And this is the gap we are feeling with our work. So it is very practical. Because we are creating the specifications and methodology to make this happen. And this is the best we can do as a professional community, a global community. And we are doing this. Since years we have started this. And this is the good news. Of course we cannot do it alone. As I said, there is a need also for legislators to act and also for governments to create the right incentives. You will take a concerted effort. Collaboration is very important. And we are engaging with policymakers. This is the other part of the work we are doing, which is not always very visible. But we are engaging as advisors to governments, to multilateral bodies like OECD, to international organizations like UNESCO, UNICEF. We are very much working together with them. And they have a big thirst for our knowledge. Because we are the technical community. So it is engaging, doing our job better through standards. And then engaging with the others to close the gap, build bridges. And it is not only us advising them. We are advising them in some technical matters. But we are learning also from them. What are the preoccupations? What is the agenda so that we can introduce this also into our work. So this is quite significant, I believe. So this is a massive program. We are very proud about this at IEEE. And the game is ethical aligned design. This is a fantastic work. And it can be just downloaded and used. For instance, we have seen that big industry actors, they take it, they customize it and use it. We don't even know about it because we don't need to know. So it is creative commons, everybody. But then we discover it and we are pleased to see this. So it's out there, anyone can use it and it should make the most of it. Yes. And in addition, our communities, both the communities that produce this work, they have not finished. Now they are customizing what it means for policy makers. What it means, let's say, for this type of industry. What it means for developing countries. We are building now groups to work on these customized versions. They are open, welcome everyone who wants to come to participate. And we have a series of standardization projects which are open to everyone to participate. So if anyone is interested about how to take principles and go to practice, please, we are very welcome at IEEE. This is what we are doing. This is our DNA to create and to convene these global communities to act in a practical matter. Okay. Konstantinos, thank you very much. My pleasure.