The summit on Artificial Intelligence in Latin America organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will take place in Boston (United States) from January 21 to 23, 2020, with the support of UNESCO.
On December 12 and 13, 2019, the Artificial Intelligence Forum which brought together authorities from the region and the rest of the world. In continuity with our priority to promote AI in the region, today we are supporting the event at MIT, the first that they organize in relation to Latin America.
The activity seeks to bring together leaders from government, industry, academia and the non-profit sector from across Latin America and the Caribbean, to identify opportunities and risks that their countries could face as they move towards the adoption of AI technologies. .
It is being organized by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, postdocs and students from the MIT community, coming from all corners of Latin America, with the collaboration of prominent Latin American universities, research institutes and multilateral organizations, among others.
The effort aims to understand the current state of AI in the research, government and industry sectors in Latin America and the Caribbean; and facilitate international dialogue and partnerships between government leaders, researchers, NGOs and industry in the region. It also aims to promote the deployment of AI research projects in Latin America and the Caribbean and, above all, inspire key actors in the region to execute the initiatives developed at the summit.
In particular, the objective of this innovative meeting is to build collaborative relationships throughout Latin America for the advancement of AI research and its applications in the region for social benefit. In this sense, during the activity, the organizers will focus on the following discussion topics: industry and services; State, poverty, health, ethics, education and climate change.
Among the different conferences and exchanges planned, the agenda also announces the first edition of the Latin American Artificial Intelligence Hackathon 2020, which will take place right after SumMIT, on Friday, January 24 and Saturday, January 25. During the hackathon, participants will address challenges related to the SumMIT discussion topics mentioned above.
UNESCO hopes that the Summit will constitute a first step towards the participation of this emerging network in its upcoming CILAC Forum 2020, the Open Science Forum to be held from September 21 to 23 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This activity constitutes a contribution of the UNESCO Regional Science Office for Latin America and the Caribbean to the full exercise, by researchers, as well as citizens in general, of their Right to Science, a right constituted as such from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which article 27 stipulates that: “Every person has the right… to participate in scientific progress and the benefits that result from it… Every person has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests that correspond to them by reason of scientific productions…”; which deepens with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, (article 15) and, at the inter-American level, with the American Convention on Human Rights –particularly in article 14 of the San Salvador Protocol on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – DESC