Will AI and robots save our economy and planet?

Information

In partnership with The National Robotarium 

From the economy to climate, public services and security, the development pace is warp-speed as the UK aims to make up for lost time amid the AI and robotics revolution. From self-driving cars and delivery drones to industry robots, AI-enabled robotics will transform all our lives in the next decade. Are we ready and how do we negotiate safe, responsible AI to achieve societal advances? 

Chair: Clare Adamson MSP, Convener, Cross-Party Group on Science and Technology 

Panellists:

Dr Ingo Keller is Head of Robotics at the National Robotarium, based at the Heriot Watt campus in Edinburgh. Ingo is a software, AI, and robotics engineer with over 20 years of experience in science and industry and leads the National Robotarium’s growing team of robotics engineers as they test and develop new technologies and systems to address real-world challenges.

Professor Soumen Sengupta is Chief Officer of South Lanarkshire University Health and Social Care Partnership, and an executive director at NHS Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire Council. He is chair of Health and Social Care Scotland, the national Integration Joint Board chief officers’ group. He is active in public sector reform locally and nationally, including digital transformation.

Dr Luciana Blaha leads the Intelligent Automation Systems (IAS) Lab at Heriot-Watt University. Her research investigates IAS including artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation and chatbots and their impact on organisational behaviour, reuniting findings from science and technology studies, business management and computing science.

Professor Ana Basiri is Professor of Geospatial Data Science, Director of the Centre for Data Science and AI, and a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She leads an interdisciplinary team developing solutions that treat data unavailability and biases as valuable sources for inferring their underlying causes. (online)