Showcasing UK Young Academy Members

The UK Young Academy is excited to host our third online webinar as part of a member-led series, for the first time, this session will feature talks from our own membership body. For this session on Tuesday, 20 August, from 1pm – 2pm (BST), we welcome Alina Patelli (Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Aston University) for a conversation exploring Ethical Artificial Intelligence for Decision-Making Support and Dhruti Shah (a multi-award-winning journalist and creative lead at Have You Thought About) for a conversation about Owning Your Story.

Ethical Artificial Intelligence for Decision-Making Support with Alina Patelli

AI has a fantastic potential to automate the menial parts of work: tedious admin, monotonous, manual processing of large volumes of data, expensive, energy inefficient, obsolete ways of managing day-to-day operations within institutions and personal lives. Replacing all these with AI is a sustainable way to gain insight into organisational and individual behaviour, revealing unexpected avenues toward improving existing patterns and processes, thus reaching goals faster, providing better services and products, and efficiently driving policy.

Conversely, AI can compromise democratic rights (such as privacy), promote biases embedded in the training data, fuel unhealthy habits, and mislead decision-makers and vulnerable groups into forming a distorted view of topical matters. In this conversation, Alina Patelli will explore her work in creating innovative *evolutionary* AI tech, which, unlike deep learning, is fully explainable, providing models, predictions, and recommendations that are entirely transparent and completely justifiable. She will showcase her algorithms as a step-by-step road map showing how the input data (e.g., traffic sensor readings) were used to derive the end result (e.g., future traffic predictions), enabling them to confidently use AI outputs to inform their decisions (e.g., the best layout for a new road).

Owning Your Story with Dhruti Shah

A confidence presentation on the power of owning your story. Often people shy away from telling their own story, but in a world where it’s important to have presence, this session will explore how to take ownership and build your personal brand of presence.

Dhruti Shah has a reputation as someone with a lot of self-confidence when it comes to sharing her stories. But, considering even she  admits her shyness in most other elements of her life – how does she tap into that self-belief? As a journalist Dhruti has spent her career immersed in the world of storytelling, and in this session, she’ll explain what skills she has had to learn in order to get over the general awkwardness of subjects such as self-promotion and taking ownership of your digital presence. It’s important to be able to do this especially in a digital world because it ties in with record keeping, equity, helping to build a community, inspiring others, and getting more eyes on your passion projects. Subjects touched upon will include taking ownership of ideas; pushing past fears; ignoring haters and doubters, and even being blunt about money.

This event is part of the UK Young Academy’s wider webinar series on special interest topics. It is coordinated by members, for members. The session will be recorded, in line with the UK Young Academy’s Privacy policy.