Inês Lynce, CMU Portugal National Co-Director, was one of the invited speakers at the 31º Digital Business Congress of APDC – Associação Portuguesa para o Desenvolvimento das Comunicações (Portuguese Association for the Development of Communications).
The discussion panel “Get future-ready: innovation trends for your radar” started with keynote speaker Shivvy Jervis, an international top futurist speaker, advisor, and broadcaster, who spoke on how digital progress and innovation must lead us towards humanity 5.0, the next wave of human-centered progress. According to her, it is important to put people at the center of technology, with adaptive artificial intelligence, believing that we have to put digital information in the real world, using augmented reality. After her keynote speech, Inês Lynce and Bruno Casalinho from Capgemini Engineering participated in the discussion panel led by journalist Cristina Esteves.
During her intervention Inês Lynce spoke about the importance of attracting and encouraging young children to invest in ICT starting with math’s but also supporting gender diversity and attracting young women to this sector. According to her, AI has historically gone through several winters and is now facing a huge explosion, the big question is where this will lead. In Artificial Intelligence, most of the theory that is still used comes from the 50’s, what changed is the computing capacity and the exponential access to data that we now have.
Additionally, the CMU Portugal Director referred to the importance of responsible #AI giving as an example the innovative JEDI course at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science “Intro to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Computer Science”, a required course for first-year Ph.D. students.
The APDC Conference started with a video message from the Portuguese President, Marcelo de Sousa, and an opening speech by Lisbon City Mayor, Carlos Moedas. The first session “Tech and Economics” was led by Rogério Carapuça, president of APDC and member of the Board of Directors of the CMU Portugal Program, along with Paulo Portas, the Congress President.
This year’s edition of the APDC Congress was focused on how economies can recover in the post-COVID era and face the recent challenges placed by the war in Europe, focusing on the impact of new technologies and their meaning for humanity.
