Ethics and AI

Just before Christmas I attended the TechUK Ethics & AI conference in London. It was an excellent event with great speakers and an knowledgeable and interesting bunch of delegates. "AI" was being interpreted more as machine learning than conversational AI/virtual humans, but here are a few of the key take-aways:

1) Kate Coughlan of the BBC presented some research they'd done on public attitudes towards AI - showing which areas excited people, and which they were wary of. Overall them seemed more wary than excited. Interestingly the notion of digital immortality came out as one of the few positives!

2) Ethics (AI and other tech) should be about making sure that people are “safe” even if they don’t care or have the time

3) The Royal Society and  Ipsos Mori also doing interesting public attitudes research. The Royal Society found that "only 9% of those surveyed had heard the term ‘machine learning’" - hence the AI catch-all! The Royal Society has also issues an AI Narratives report.

5) The RS presentation included an image from Boyle's notes (see image at top) which showed "extending life" as one of his top priorities - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7798012/Robert-Boyles-prophetic-scientific-predictions-from-the-17th-century-go-on-display-at-the-Royal-Society.html

6) Luciano Floridi (https://twitter.com/Floridi) was the keynote. He has a useful 5 factor AI Ethics model which is based on a bio-ethics one.:

• Beneficence (do only good): Promoting Well-Being, Preserving Dignity, and Sustaining the Planet
• Non-maleficence (do no harm): Privacy, Security and “Capability Caution”
• Autonomy (of the human, not the AI): The Power to Decide (Whether to Decide)
• Justice: Promoting Prosperity and Preserving Solidarity (and eliminating discrimination)
• Explicability: Enabling the Other Principles Through Intelligibility and Accountability

All in all a great day, and certainly going along next year.

British Quebec Business Council AI Conference at McGill University, Montreal

Daden MD David Burden headed off to Montreal last week to present at the British Quebec Business Council's AI Conference at McGill University, Montreal. David spoke both on the current approach to AI Governance in the UK and about Daden's work on virtual tutors, mentors and persona's, and trying to help the audience to understand the different ways that people are using the term "AI" in the first place!

There were some great presentations from McGill academics on various AI projects there (mostly machine learning) and also from companies using AI in everything from medical image processing (machine learning) to financial auditing (machine learning). Also a particularly thought provoking presentation on AI and the built environment from Francesca Birks, Lead Foresight at Arup.

David was also invited to speak to a group of training professionals in Montreal about our work on Trainingscapes and in immersive 3D and VR,  meet with an official at the British Consulate and take in a couple of business meetings, so all in all a busy week!

Nice wall art of Leonard Cohen on the side of a Montreal tower block!

AI & Robotics: The Main Event 2017

David spoke at the AI & Robotics: The Main Event 2017 conference yesterday. The main emphasis was far more on AI (well machine learning) rather than robotics. David talked delegates through the AI Landscape model before talking about the use of chatbots/virtual characters/AI within the organisation in roles such as teaching, training, simulation, mentoring and knowledge capture and access.

Other highlights from the day included:

• Prof. Noel Sharkey talking about responsible robotics and his survey on robots and sex
• Stephen Metcalfe MP and co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on AI talking about the APPG and Government role
• Prof. Philip Bond talking about the Government's Council for Science and Technology and its role in promoting investment in AI (apparently there's a lot of it coming!)
• Pete Trainor from BIMA talking about using chatbots to help avoid male suicides by providing SU, a reflective companion - https://www.bima.co.uk/en/Article/05-May-2017/Meet-SU
• Chris Ezekial from Creative Virtual talking about their success with virtual customer service agents (Chris and I were around for the first chatbot boom!)
• Intelligent Assistants showing the 2nd highest growth in interest from major brands in terms of engagement technologies
• Enterprise chat market worth $1.9bn
• 85% of enterprise customer engagement to be without human contact by 2020
• 30% increase in virtual agent use (forecast or historic, timescale - not clear!)
• 69% of consumers reported that they would choose to interact with a chatbot before a human because they wanted instant answers!

There was also a nice 2x2 matrix (below) looking at new/existing jobs and human/machine workers. 

This chimed nicely with a slide by another presenter which showed how as automation comes in workers initially resist, then accept, then as it takes their job over say the job wasn't worth doing and that they've now found a better one - til that starts to be automated. In a coffee chat we were wondering where all the people from the typing pools went when PCs came in. Our guess is that they went (notionally) to call centres - and guess where automation is now striking! Where will they go next?

iLRN Immersive Learning Conference - Coimbra June 2017 - and Fieldscapes wins best demo!

I was lucky enough to get to spend last week in Portugal attending the Immersive Learning Network's annual conference in Coimbra, Portugal. I delivered both a paper on Fieldscapes, and a couple of hands-on demos of the system - and I'm proud to say that Fieldscapes won best demo!

If you search Twitter for #iLRN2017 then you'll get a pretty good feel of the conference and I tweeted out most of my highlights, but here's a few key takeaways.

iLRN Itself

iLRN looks to be establishing itself as the "go to" place for research into immersive learning environments, which includes 3D, VR, AR, MR etc (in fact one of the calls at the end of the conference was to have a decent definition of immersive learning!). They've also identified a trivium (we were in an old University!) of base subjects (computer science, game science, pedagogic science), and a quadrivium for higher study (multiple perspectives, NPIRL, situtaion/context, transfer).

We working up our own "guide to Immersive Learning", but it certainly looks like iLRN will be a key reference point and we're keen to get involved in the annual horizon scan and gap analysis their keen to do.

OpenSim

I've not seen this much OpenSim in years! Seems like every other presentation was talking about research using it. What it does highlight is that there is still a lot off valid 3D immersive research going on and people haven't all jumped on the VR bandwagon. OpenSim is I think primarily used because it is a) open, b) cheap/free and c) easy to use (c.f. Unity3D). But there is a recognition that the visual quality (at least to the standard shown here ) is now falling below what people find acceptable. Talking to people at the Fieldscapes demos there may be a real opportunity  for us wit Fieldscapes here as we are a) cheap, b) easy (easier?) to use c) higher graphic quality. We're not open, but we have had elements of PIVOTE as open source in the past and are certainly keen to talk about opening the PIVOTE standard, and maybe even the PIVOTE engine.

3D and VR

In relation to the OpenSim/VR issue there was one interesting paper that showed that the differences in learning from 3D and VR were not actually that great - and in some cases the move to VR reduced it! We'd love to do some more solid research in this area.

Other Snippets

Some other papers and demos that caught my eye:

• Using Kinect as a presentation trainer - capturing your body movements and audio levels and commenting as you go!
• Using Unity3D to create a visual memory palace in 3D/VR
• A good longitudinal study in the use of MiRTLE (blast from the past) for delivering immersive classrooms
• Leonel and his team developing an ontology for immersive learning authoring - will be interesting to see what links there are with Fieldscapes
• Using AR posters around the classroom walls for the kids to trigger content - especially languages. The speakers whole house is AR'd!
• Great use of www.menti.com by Hanan (see below) for audience participation
• A nice scottish Empire exhibition, build and use of VSim with primary kids
• Nice Communicate! authoring tool for dialog based trainers
• On the down side, far too much use of 3rd party promo videos in some keynotes

Old Friends

Elements of the conference were certainly like an SL/OpenSim meet up from the late noughties. In particular it was great to meet VRider/Hanan (centre) face to face having known and worked with him in SL for over 8 years or so!

Next Time?

Overall the event is certainly worth going to again. Montana in 2018 may be a bit off a long haul but London in 2019 won't! My recommendations for an even better event:

• More discussion, less presentations (perhaps have far more posters instead). 
• Look at using techniques such as Delphic Oracle and Fish-bowl which worked so well at OU's ReLive conference on Immersive Learning
• Use immersive technologies to let people attend and participate remotely
• Ditto between conferences to broaden out SIG and local meetings - and more of those?
• More use of menti.com and similar

Overall, a great week, top'd and tial'd by trips to Bussaco and Porto, and a lot to reflect on, some of which will make its way into later posts and writings.

Fieldscapes Workshop accepted for ITTE Conference in June

We're delighted that we've been accepted to run a Fieldscapes workshop at the in Hull on 21st June 2017 at the Association for Information Technology in Teacher Education's 31st International Conference at the University of Hull.

The whole conference should be a great event and you can find out more or sign-up! And a great excuse to visit Hull again during its City of Culture year.

Fieldscapes at Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education Conference 2017

The Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education Conference is a long standing virtual event looking at the use of virtual worlds and 3D immersive environments in education. Whilst much of the early VWBPE was in Second Life, Wonderland and other virtual worlds - and VWBPE main hub is still in Second Life, the conference now includes other environments - such as our own Fieldscapes.

We have two Fieldscapes contributions to the conference:

• On 31st March at 6pm UK time, 1000 SLT/CET we have a presentation on Fieldscapes, and since the theme of the conference is "Legacy" we'll look at how Fieldscapes grew out of our early work in Second Life and Open Sim.
• On 4th April at 9pm UK time, 1300 SLT/CET we are hosting a "virtual field trip" to a "virtual field trip" when we invite delegates into Fieldscapes to experience a couple of our lessons, and then leave then to play with the editor.

You can find out more about, and sign up to, VWPE2017 at https://vwbpe.org/ and details of the virtual field trip and associated Passport to the Metaverse are at https://vwbpe.org/vwbpe-news/vwbpe-2017-immersive-experiences-and-passport-to-the-metaverse.

VR in Education: Moving the Classroom to Mars (and other field trips)!

Bookings are now open for David's talk at the on-line VR/AR Summit on 13th Sept. David will talk in general about the potential benefits, opportunities and challenges of VR in education - and also provide a high level overview of Fieldscapes and how its easy authoring system will open up VR educational content generation to a wider audience.

Follow the link below to register.
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13939/211375?utm_content=VR+in+Education