Keynote



Speaker: Prof. Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Title: Towards Smarter Societies

Abstract – As the recent triumph of alphaGo has shown, the exponential in-
crease in computer power allows us now to solve challenging problems that
seemed to be out of reach for a long time. So, would we eventually be able
to build superintelligent computers that would be able to solve humanities’ 21st
century problems and run our society in an optimal way? Surprisingly, the an-
swer is “no”, because data volumes increase faster than processing power, and
systemic complexity even faster. This has a number of implications: local knowl-
edge, context as well as distributed computing and control will become more
important. Science will be relevant again to decide what data to process and
how, and how to collect the right kind of data in the first place. This talk will
elaborate on a number of pitfalls in the areas of Data Science and AI, and it will
make proposals how to use these technologies and the Internet of Things more
successfully, with context-aware approaches.