With Paris playing host to the Paris Peace Forum from 11 to 13 November, the GovTech summit on November 12th, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF2018) from 12 to 14 November, and concluding with a UNESCO/ISOC/Mozilla symposium on November 15th (and the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 running simultaneously in Dubai from 29 October to 16 November), the start of November saw a lot a activity relating to Internet (as associated) Governance. For those of us based in the UK, this series of conference was further continued with the UK IGF 2018 on November 22nd.

Reporting on our work towards developing policy recommendation, industry standards and educational resources, UnBias participated in the IGF2018, the UNESCO/ISOC/Mozilla symposium, and UKIGF2018, as well as an informal presentation at the CNIL.

In addition to contributing to the open discussions on issues such as on Emerging Youth Practices and the Digital Economy, the prospects of using AI to moderate online content in a session with the playful title “AI will solve all problems. But can it?“, and connecting with people, Ansgar represented UnBias at IGF2018 by speaking on the “AI Ethics: privacy, transparency and knowledge construction” panel.

For those interested in a quick overview of each of the three days of IGF2018, the Digital Watch Observatory has provided summaries of the key events on each data here.  The IGF is also in the process of making available the Transcripts, the Videos and the Reports of the sessions.

At the UNSECO/ISCO/Mozilla symposium for an “Open Discussion on Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to advance Knowledge Societies and Good Governance”, Ansgar contributed to setting the scene of the discussions of the day by providing addressing the question of “What is AI?” in the context of current debates on good governance for knowledge societies.

Due to the informal setting of the presentation at CNIL, there was more time to go into a wider range of materials on the educational resources produced by UnBias, the aims and progress of the IEEE P7003 Standard for Algorithmic Bias Considerations, our recent report on “a governance framework for algorithmic accountability and transparency” and our work to support the ICO’s development of the Age Appropriate Design code.

At the UK IGF 2018 we contributed by providing one of the two “explainer” talks, with our “Algorithm Explainer” focusing on “how algorithms work and what the implications are in terms of how we access information”. The full event is viewable via Livestream, provided by ISOC. Below is the segment with our presentation.