Manon goes to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum

In September this year, I (Manon Kempermann) had the honor to attend the yearly Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a weeklong conference where 30 laureates of the Turing Award, Field medal and similar awards gather together with 200 young researchers in computer science and mathematics from around the world in Heidelberg. Being one of these 200 young researchers gave me the opportunity to connect to the laureates and to many other young, enthusiastic researchers. The week was packed with not only lectures by laureates and other researchers, but also hands-on masterclasses, small group interactions with the laureates and many social events including a boat ride on the Neckar river and a visit of Schwetzingen Palace and Heidelberg Castle.

While it was definitely a great experience, I was a bit surprised about the picture that got painted about AI developments on the stage there. Having spent the past months learning, thinking and researching about how we can ensure AI is developed safety and governed responsibly, I hoped to also hear differential views about AI developments at HLF, but got confronted with almost only hype around AI and negligence of the concerns about potentially catastrophic risks of AI raised by several other laureates of the Nobel Prize or Turing Award like Yoshua Bengio or Geoffrey Hinton not present at this year’s HLF. Nevertheless, I met many other young researchers sharing these concerns too resulting in many great conversations about how to make AI safe and governed responsibly.

Being also an Abbe Fellow at the HLF, I reported from the HLF on the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung’s Instagram. You can find my daily posts starting here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOf-4tzDLwT/

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