The BrAIN seminar, an AIX Forum event, organized at the University of Helsinki’s Think Corner in January hosted almost a full house.
FCAI has received plenty of positive feedback for the new train of events that provides a meeting place for researchers of different disciplines, companies and public organizations interested in AI.
Last autumn, FCAI launched AIX Forum, a train of events aiming to find novel opportunities for high-impact AI applications in Finland and provide a meeting place for AI researchers, researchers of other disciplines, companies, and public organizations.
After six successfully organized AIX Forum events, Professor Petri Myllymäki, the Vice-Director of FCAI, says that FCAI has received plenty of positive feedback about the forum. “People have thanked us especially for the fact that the floor is given to those who need AI the most and not just to AI experts.”
The AIX Forum events are suitable especially for organizations that cannot find the needed AI-based solutions in the current AI toolkits, and who would be ready to commit to a long-term collaboration with FCAI researchers.
The mission of FCAI researchers is to develop AI applications that answer real-life needs in different areas of life, and the AIX Forum wants to present new, practical solutions for those needs. In the abbreviation AIX, the first two letters come from the term Artificial Intelligence while the letter X represents the changing application areas of AI. X can refer to any problem domain where AI could provide a solution and it may be related to an industrial or societal sector or a scientific field.
“So far we have already addressed themes like traffic, public services, cancer research, economics, health and maritime,” Professor Myllymäki says.
Most AIX Forum events consist of three parts. Typically, they start with brief pitch talks in which experts from different fields present a problem that could be solved by using AI. The talks are followed by panel discussions in which AI researchers and developers, together with the speakers, seek solutions for the presented problems. After that, there is some time for networking and peer support. “You may find help from the audience, from people who have struggled with similar issues in another field or another sector of the society,” Myllymäki explains.
The events are gaining popularity also among AI researchers. Myllymäki says that an increasing number of researchers at FCAI have understood that the broad scientific, societal, and economical impact, which the Academy of Finland flagships are supposed to deliver, calls for in-depth interdisciplinary collaboration. The AIX Forum is a platform that helps to recognize possibilities for such a collaboration. “We try to find issues that the next-generation AI methods developed at FCAI can help to solve,” Myllymäki says.
According to him, the AIX Forum provides researchers with clear research challenges that have a well-defined goal but that cannot be fully solved with the current AI methods. The pitch talks may also discuss a broader set of problems or a source of data.
“We are still developing AIX Forum and at this point we are testing out different kinds of formats and getting more experience. But we can see that people are increasingly interested in this series, as we already have many new events coming up in the early 2020.”