 Welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit. Our guest today is Irakli Baridzee. Welcome. Irakli is the head of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Unicre. Thank you, Gillian. I'm very happy to be with you today. Delighted that you're here. First of all, tell me a little bit about the work that you're doing. Right, thanks a lot. I'm the head of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Unicre, Unicre, and United Nations Agency, which helps countries, UN member states, to articulate their policies related to the issues of crime, crime prevention, criminal justice, rule of law, human rights. And our center is helping member states to understand how, on the one hand, criminals can use artificial intelligence, how to prevent that, and how, at the same time, law enforcement agencies can use artificial intelligence to solve crime-related problems, but to do that in a responsible, ethical, and human rights compliant manner. So we're running many different projects, practical projects. We facilitate the AI technology for the use and to solve issues and problems. At the same time, we're supporting UN member states to actually come up with regulations, governance instruments, and mechanisms, and provide them with those solutions. Can you give me some examples of those solutions? Sure. Last month, together with Interpol, we issued a toolkit. It's a practical governance instrument for the responsible use of AI by law enforcement. Use of AI by law enforcement is one of the most sensitive application of artificial intelligence, but at the same time, most of the law enforcement agencies are experimenting how to use AI to solve crime-related problems, and they are very much interested to do so in a responsible, ethical, and human rights compliant manner. Therefore, together with Interpol, we started to actually create such a guidebook, such a governance instrument for them. European Commission supported this initiative, and it was a multi-stakeholder initiative which ran for several years. We involved private sector, academia, civil society, and many other stakeholders, obviously law enforcement, to develop that guidelines. And last month, at the science conference of the Interpol together and in the presence of the Secretary General of Interpol, we unveiled and released the first version of such a toolkit. It's a very practical guidebook. It's been now tested in 15 countries, and we are receiving very good feedback. We're going to improve the toolkit, and by end of the year, there will be a next version of the toolkit released for all UN member states. How do you ensure that this is adopted internationally, though? So what we are doing is a second phase of the initiative, is that we are going to help countries to translate this toolkit, because toolkit is a general one developed for all countries in the world, to translate it into their national practices, into the standard operational procedures of theirs as well. And it's going to be quite a massive undertaking from the UN and Interpol side and from our center. So we're going to provide trainings, workshops, and practical engagements with the countries to help them to adopt it, implement it, and then obviously translate it into their national practices. OK. Tell me some more about the examples that you have and you use around the AI for good. So just now, a couple of hours ago, actually, I presented at the stage our AI for Safer Children initiative. And this is one of our flagship projects, and I'm very proud of that. This is a partnership between our center and the Ministry of Interior of United Arab Emirates. And I'm very grateful and thankful for the support of the UAE and UAE government for this initiative. It's an initiative which we started two years ago. We launched it at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And it envisages two major things. One is to raise awareness how artificial intelligence tools can support combating sexual exploitation and abuse of children. And second one, probably even more important, to build a global hub of all AI tools available in the world, which is developed for that purpose, and to train and give access to the UN member states to use these tools. Last year, this time, we launched a global hub. And we're very proud that right now, more than 90 countries have access to the global hub. We have over 350 officers already using it. And in the hub, we have over 70 AI tools available for all countries in the world to use it. And another thing which we're very proud of, and we have a very close cooperation with the technology providers who are developing these tools, so we're facilitating that, that we have a pledge from the technology providers that any country in the world, which needs the tool for a specific use case, can use any tool for free under the UN umbrella so that they don't need to pay for it if they cannot afford it. So we actually lowered the barrier of access to the technology for any country in the world. And that really contributes to the ideas of democratization of the artificial intelligence tools and somehow contributing in ensuring that this widening gap of the digital divide, which is happening in the world, can be sort of stopped and contributed into that. How has that been received? Oh, it's been received very well. As I said last year, we launched the global hub and now we have over 90 countries accessing to it. We are processing applications on a daily basis so the country memberships are growing. And I'm very proud that it's been recognized, one of the top UN initiatives for AI for good. So in this summit that has this example was again very well received. We had quite a wider discussion and many partners and stakeholders are interested to support it and make it sort of more global than it is now. I understand. And we've seen AI develop at a huge rate in particular in the last year. Where do you see what you're doing in the next, same mid to long term? So AI has developed a lot and I've been on the AI for good summits since its inception and every single one of them and our conversations have become more and more advanced. Right now we're talking about concrete ways how to govern artificial intelligence, what are the governance structures, instruments and formulas could be used in the future. So in the future we will have quite in-depth and urgent conversations about governance of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can certainly solve a lot of problems, can contribute into the development, into the solutions to the UN sustainable development goals and many other things. But at the same time it can cause problems and these problems can be of very serious nature. That's why it is very much necessary to have those governance structures in place so to ensure the technology benefits and the risks are mitigated. Sharon, you talked about those problems. What are the general challenges for you around AI? So there are many challenges of course around AI and AI can be used in our work for example by criminals, terrorist groups and others as well. And this is a very powerful technology so we do need to be ensuring that people who are working to prevent the use of technology for example by criminals are fully aware of and they know what are the dangers. So our center has over the years now issued number of reports related to that, related how criminals can use artificial intelligence and we have provided trainings and information to the agencies including law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, how to actually counter that and how to build knowledge and understanding of these technologies. At the same time of course as powerful as this technology is it can take away some jobs and it can of course take away some entire job categories as well. So therefore we should be very much aware of that and see how can countries prepare themselves to counter that. So we have at the moment over 60 or so countries who have adopted national strategies and they identified AI as a priority in it and they're actually working very hard from the UN perspective and from my personal perspective what I would like to see is that all countries in the world adopting AI national strategy so that they all invest in understanding of this technology so that AI benefits everyone in the world and not selected few so that we are not ending up in a world where only selected few are benefiting of it. Okay and you spoke about it in your conference this morning but also in just now Unicree is working on ensuring the law enforcement can use AI. How do you do that in a compliant way? So this is again very, very important to ensure that AI is used in a responsible ethical and human rights compliant manner and we are offering different solutions to that. Obviously there are other international mechanisms who are also offering solutions from our perspective. As I said it, we developed a specialized guidebook for the law enforcement agencies which is designed for all 193 UN member states on responsible use of AI by law enforcement. So this is a comprehensive guidebook over 150 pages it includes checklist, it includes practical advice, it's practical guidance as well and it offers them an opportunity if all of it is implemented is that on the one hand AI is used to solve crime related problems because as I always underline that law enforcement agencies need AI to solve problems. Without AI right now it is actually quite, it's not really feasible how would any law enforcement agency in an adequate way be able to tackle growing problems. Law enforcement agencies, anyone else is collecting enormous amount of data and someone needs to analyze the data and make sense of it. And if we don't have applications and tools like AI tools for individuals or groups of individuals it would take forever to analyze and come up with adequate analysis of any data in the world. Therefore you do need the AI solutions to it but at the same time you need to use that in a responsible ethical human rights compliant manner and that's sort of a challenge in the balance which we would need to be keeping in the coming years. Fascinating. Rakhli Baridze, thank you so much for your insights. Thank you for your time. Thank you Julian, wonderful to be with you. Thank you. And more to come on the AI for Good Global Summit here in Geneva.