 Thanks for joining us in Geneva for the AI for Good Global Summit 2019 and my next guest is Vicky Hansen She's chief executive officer at ACM the association for computer machinery Vicky. Thank you so much for joining us I think you're having me here. So Vicky to start with what can you tell us about ACM? But it's not like the other organizations we talked to here at AI for Good Global Summit You know the large tech grips and so on so tell us more about it Yes ACM is a member organization. It's not a company. It's not a job that you have It's a member organization. We're the oldest and largest global computing society for professionals in computing We have members in 190 countries around the world and we serve a couple of different missions. We have Probably that we're probably best known for our research. We have a lot of academic conferences We have many publications for people who are researchers throughout the entire spectrum of computing We also serve practitioners those people who are out there doing the day-to-day work people who are working in industry and for those people we provide a lot of professional resources Development materials that kind of information so that people can keep relevant up-to-date on what's going on in computing But we also have other efforts such as policy efforts in both the United States and Europe We have technology policy committees that provide non-partisan information to policy makers about different technology issues and We have education groups, so we do educational curricula on various topics within computing and those are used around the world It's just a whole variety of education and efforts that we do and So it is a little bit different in that we are there as a resource We're there as a network for people who are in the computing profession so that we can get together and as a group We have you know a lot of ability to help each other and in essence help the world, too Yeah, and of course you are also the organizers of very prestigious awards. We are Yes, we have a large number of awards, but the most prestigious is the ACM AM Turing Award This is obviously named after Alan Turing And we've had the award for over 50 years now. We had our big 50th special for having the award a couple of years ago And we're very proud of the fact that this year the awardees have been named for people who have done research in deep learning Which is a very important area in AI these days. The awardees are Jeffrey Hinton, Yashua Benjio and Jan Lacune for their work in figuring out about deep neural networks and how those have really transformed artificial intelligence And to some extent have actually fed back on neuroscience because it started with the idea that That was really prevailing against the time. At the time I should say people were looking at symbolic logic as the way to go for artificial intelligence And the deep neural network started from the idea, no we're going to look at the human brain and how does the human brain work And maybe that can give us some insight into artificial intelligence And it wasn't able to really succeed at the time because when they started the work in like the 1980s we didn't have enough computing power for neural networks to really work And it took the computing power of the last decade or something to be able to have enough big data and enough performance in the machines to be able to make the neural networks work And since now they're working it's just really taken off in performance and speech recognition. The kinds of things that we use every day has just completely taken off because of the work of these award winners And I'm sure that at ACM you also have lots of discussions around ethics in AI and there are lots of debates about the role of AI. Will it replace humans or will it augment humans? What role will it play? What's your take on this? That's interesting. So from my particular background I have come from an accessibility background and so I always looked at machines and AI that kind of thing as augmenting human abilities I was having a discussion with someone yesterday in fact about Ada Lovelace, a very well known woman in computing And she's credited with having developed the first software programs for computers And her whole idea was that computers would augment human abilities. I don't know if that's well known. But anyway, so I sort of come from that perspective But I wanted to follow up on something else. You said we have debates on ethics and we do have huge debates on ethics Some of it does follow along the issue of our machines going to replace humans, which I know is where you were going with that particular question But more widely I wanted to say that we are having a whole debate about what it really means to do ethical computing in this day and age People are worried that we have all this data. What are we going to do with it? What kind of privacy do we have? That kind of thing Within this past year ACM has come out on a guide, a conduct for professional ethics for computing professionals And it's not a list of you should do this and you should do this and you should do this What it is is a series of questions that you should ask yourself as a computing professional when you start working on a new program in a new area Really think about the ethical applications of what it is that you are doing That's a very interesting point. Now you are a sponsor of the AI For Good Global Summit Can I ask you what you'd like the outcomes of this summit to be? Because we are here to talk about concrete actions as well to make things happen And that is why we were here So we have been sponsors before I should say and we have been sponsors because we support the mission of AI For Good But this year in particular when I went to our executive board and I said, you know, we'd like to be a sponsor again What do you think? They said we want to really get involved in what they're doing because we have a lot of members who are very interested in the goals of the summit And they would really like to get involved in some of the activities So we are here to learn about what are the activities that are going on and how can we get our members involved in it Okay, Vicki Hansen, thank you very much Thank you