 Welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit here in Geneva. My guest is Mark Crawley. He's an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo. Mark, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. So, Mark, what can you tell us about your field of research in AI? How can AI be used as a force for good? Well, I think AI is almost only can be used for good. There's so many potentials it can be used for. The sustainability goals that the UN has set for us that is a very challenging framework of indicators and goals for the world. And in order to solve them, it's kind of daunting to look at them. We need to use the most powerful tools we have available to us. And AI and machine learning let us process data, help people make decisions and kind of embed their own preferences and values into systems. And it's probably one of the best ways to help us have a hope of progressing towards those goals. Now your research in particular focuses on using computational power to solve real life issues like conservation and the environment. What can you tell us about it? Right. So, some of my research is an area called computational sustainability where you try to combine machine learning techniques with real-world sustainable domains such as forestry and reserve design and invasive species kind of modeling. So, some of my research using reinforcement learning on trying to planning in forestry and predicting forest fires is kind of one of the ways I'm doing that. But there's many researchers trying to connect these tools with these real-life problems, which is interesting because they usually have noise and challenges in them that our own kind of academic tools that we come up with don't necessarily have. So, it pushes us to improve the algorithms as well as helping something in the world. How important is it for an academic like you to be at a summit that the AI For Good Global Summit and to meet other stakeholders? Yeah, I think it's essential because it's easy in an academia to kind of stay locked in your own ivory tower of research and sort of focus on, you know, the publication sort of treadmill of results and numbers and simple models. And so, we're talking with people in the real world to make sure that we are grounding our research into something that's going to help. But it also helps you realize how people see, especially for AI, how people see AI in society and what they're planning for and how they plan to use it. And so, helping to correct and kind of update people's understanding of what's actually happening in this field that's changing so quickly is really important for us as well. And you also work closely with one of the co-organizers, XPRIZE. What's your role exactly? You're a judge, right? I'm a judge for the IBM AI XPRIZE. And yeah, so there's 30 judges and we're looking at all the proposals people have put in, these amazing projects, people around the world trying to use AI in some way to improve the world in their own community or country. And these are not researchers doing it. They're people in companies or even in small institutions or just privately coming up with a project and we're kind of coaching as well as judging and trying to sort through and help as many of them be successful as possible even though only the three are going to win at the end in terms of awards. Mark, thank you very much. Thank you.