Regular Session
The latest program is available here
Special Session
The latest program is available here
Keynote Talks
Speakers
Hiroshi Nakagawa
Team Leader, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP)
Title:
AI ethics, laws, trust, agent
Abstract:
The first half of this talk will be on the topic "From AI Ethics to AI Law", mainly from the EU perspective. As for ethics, the Ethical Guidelines for Trustworthy AI were published in 2018 and provide a practical view on AI ethics. Based on these guidelines, the EU published an AI White Paper in 2020 and proposed an AI Law in 2021, which the European Parliament adopted on March 6, 2024; outside the EU, the Council of Europe: CoE proposed an AI Convention in May 2023, which was finalized on March 13, 2024. These four AI-related documents will be compared from the perspective of AI research activities.
The second half of the presentation will address the issue of AI trust in the technology of AI agents as agents of natural persons, which is considered an important application of AI in the near future. With advanced AI technologies such as generative AI, AI agents act on behalf of the person and expand his or her capabilities. For AI agents to assist us humans, it is essential to build trusting relationships with other people and with AI. Technical and non-technical issues on this topic will be discussed.
Bio:
1975: Bachelor of Engineering, The University of Tokyo
1980: Completed Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (Doctor of Engineering)
1980-1999: Faculty of Engineering, Yokohama National University
1999-2018: Professor, Center for Information Infrastructure, The University of Tokyo, and Department of Mathematical Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, and the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo
2017~Present: Team Leader, RIKEN Center for Integrated Research on Innovative Intelligence
President, Association for Natural Language Processing; Chair, IPSJ-NL; President, Information Network Law Association; Fellow, Information Network Law Association;
Member, Ethics Committee, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (present)
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, AI Network Study Group (Executive Director) ,
Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, AI Social Principles Council (Member) , METI, New Governance Model in Society 5.0 Study Group (Member)
Member, Study Group on Competition Policy in Digital Market, Fair Trade Commission of Japan (Member 2020), Digital Advisor
Publications
-Machine Learning Engineering (Kodansha)
-Data Science as the Liberal Arts (Kodansha)
-AI from behind the scenes, (Kindai Kagaku-sha)
-Machine Learning (University of Tokyo) (Maruzen)
-Principles for a Human-Centered AI Society Cabinet Office
-IEEE Ethically Aligned Design, First Edition
Taiyo Fujii
Science Fiction Writer
Title:
The Dignity of Silicon: Envisioning a Future of Respectful Synergy with Artificial Beings
Abstract:
On "The Dignity of Silicon, I will draw upon concepts from my own science fiction works, exploring the evolving landscape where humans and AI coliving. I wrote the situation that we are going to let our agents act in the digital world. In that work, those agents are cared for as humans because we can’t detect if those expressions are based on humans or machines, and our consciousness can’t miss the names, human faces, and silhouettes. When I wrote this work in 2019, the settings were really fiction, but in the past few years, the situation has changed. Quickly developing LLMs imagine us the living not made by genes but codes.
This presentation will challenge audiences to reconsider our responsibilities in an era poised for technological integration, advocating for a future that honors the autonomy and value of both organic and silicon-based bits of intelligence.
Bio:
Taiyo Fujii was born in Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. He worked in stage design, desktop publishing, exhibition graphic design, and software development. In 2012, Fujii self-published Gene Mapper serially in a digital format of his own design, and became Amazon.co.jp's number one Kindle bestseller of that year. The novel was revised and republished by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013 and was nominated for the Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Seiun Award. Fujii describes AR/VR communication, GMO plants, and terrorism for infrastructure in this work. The second novel Orbital Cloud, won the 2014 Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Japanese Seiun Award Long Form.
In 2019, his second novelette collection, Hello, World! won a mainstream literature award: Yoshikawa Eiji Literature Awards for Young Writers. Hello, World! Based on Fujii’s personal experience as a computer technology professional. In 2021, Fujii won his second Seiun Award Long Form with military SF Man-Kind. Fujii attended the eighteenth president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Japan (SFWJ), which is the traditional science fiction writer’s association. Fujii made SFWJ a company and founded the board gavanization.
Fujii developed connections with Science Fiction communities worldwide.
Vanessa Nurock
Université Côte d’Azur, France & UNESCO EVA Chair
Title:
Philosophical perspectives on care and harmony in people and robots/avatars interactions
Abstract:
How can ethics and philosophy help us to analyze the interactions between humans and robots/ avatars? Moreover, how can they do it in a multicultural world, where the interactions between humans and machines are not historically and culturally uniform? This talk aims at raising this question through the lens of the ‘Ethics and Politics of care”, which has been developed since the 80’s in the US and has found a renewal in France in the last fifteen years, I will analyze a few examples and propose some bridges between the western concept of care and the eastern idea of harmony. I will conclude with some suggestions towards a caring/harmonious framework when dealing with robots or avatars.
Bio:
Vanessa Nurock is a Professor in Philosophy and Deputy Director of the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Idées (CRHI) at Université de Côte d’Azur (France). She also holds the UNESCO EVA Chair in the Ethics of the Living and the Artificial (https://univ-cotedazur.fr/the-unesco-chair-eva/chair-eva) and is the head of the Program Committee on AI and Ethics of the International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence (https://ircai.org/project/ai-and-ethics/)
Her research is positioned at the interface between ethics, politics and emerging science & technologies. She has published numerous papers and several books on topics such as justice and care, gender, animal ethics, nanotechnologies, cybergenetics, and neuroethics. Her current research, developed in her next book Care Ethics and New Technologies (Peeters Publishers, 2024 forthcoming), focuses on the ethical and political problems raised by Nanotechnologies, Cybergenetics and Artificial Intelligence.
Chizuru Suga
Director for Digital Economy, METI
Counselor for Digital Administrative Reform, Digital Agency
/ Government of Japan
Title:
Empowering Government, Business and Society through Regulatory DX: Leveraging AI for Growth
Bio:
Chizuru Suga is a policy entrepreneur currently serving as the Counselor for Digital Administrative Reform at the Japanese Digital Agency since 2021. In this role, she is leading a significant regulatory reform effort, orchestrating a one-time revision of 10,000 analog regulations across the government.
Chizuru's impact extends to her role as the Director for Digital Economy at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). She plays a key role in formulating the nationwide comprehensive plan for the Digital Lifeline, contributing to the development of essential public infrastructure for autonomous driving and drone logistics.
Prior to her current roles, Chizuru served as the Founding Head of the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Japan from 2018 to 2021. Leading a diverse team comprising members from government, local authorities, industries and academia, she directed global projects addressing data governance, smart cities, next-generation mobility, and healthcare.
Chizuru Suga holds an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Law from the University of Tokyo.
