ICAI’s 2022 Graphic Overview

Although we are already half way through 2023, it’s always good to look back at the successes our institute have reached so far. In the spirit of ICAI’s mission to support open talent and technology development and ‘Make AI for Everyone’, we managed to accomplish great goals in the past year.

Therefore, we would like to present you: The ICAI 2022 graphic overview, in which we offer a comprehensive overview of our achievements in 2022.

This infographic showcases four of the six pillars of ICAI, which resembles the foundation of our institute: ICAI Labs, ICAI Academy, ICAI Venture and ICAI Connector.

Labs

ICAI ended 2022 with a portfolio of 32 labs. 334 PhD students and 100 partners worked together to deliver a great amount of 254 research papers, which we are very proud of. We continue to grow, and expect to add more valuable labs to our ecosystem this year.

Connector:

We managed to organise a lot of interesting events within our community, giving visitors the opportunity to network and educate themselves about the latest trends in the field of AI. Interested in our next event? Don’t forget to regularly check our events page on the website, or sign up for our monthly newsletter.

Academy:

With our Dutch podcast ‘Snoek op Zolder’ (produced by Henny Huijgens) we reached the magic number of over 5500 downloads! Little teaser: a new season is in the making, and we can’t wait to share this new season with our community.

Announcement two new ICAI labs

We are expanding! In the past weeks, two new ICAI labs have launched. ICAI is happy to have them as a part of our ecosystem.

Explainable AI for Health

The Explainable AI for Health lab is a collaboration between the Leiden University Medical Center, Amsterdam UMC and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Together, they will work on developing new forms of artificial intelligence that help physicians and patients with clinical decisions. 

The goal of the lab is to tailor and validate new inherently explainable AI techniques and guidelines that can be used for clinical decision-making.

Scientific director Peter A.N. Bosman says: “Clinical decision support based on AI can have great added value for physicians and patients”.

More info about this lab can be found on the the dedicated lab page: https://icai.ai/explainable-ai-for-health-lab/

Responsible and Ethical AI for Healthcare Lab (REAiHL)

Our 49th lab is the REAiHL lab, is a collab between SAS Institute, Erasmus Medical Center and Delft University of Technology. The lab aims to develop and deploy AI technologies that are safe, transparent, and aligned with ethical principles to improve healthcare outcomes.

The new AI Ethics Lab was initiated by internist-intensivist Michel van Genderen from Erasmus MC. Diederik Gommers, Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at Erasmus MC, is also closely involved: “Initially, the new AI Ethics Lab will focus on developing best practices for the Intensive Care Unit,” Buijsman says. “But our ultimate goal is to develop a generalized framework for the safe and ethical application of AI throughout the entire hospital. We therefore expect to soon start addressing use cases from other clinical departments as well.”

More info about REAiHl can be found here: https://icai.ai/reaihl/

ICAI Deep-Dive: Working with Medical Data

Working with medical data comes with many challenges, ranging from improving data usability to maintaining privacy and security. To outline some of these challenges, ICAI organizes the ICAI Deep-Dive: Working with Medical Data on the 3rd of November, 15:00-18:00. This hybrid event will be moderated by Nancy Irisarri Méndez and will take place on location at Radboud University and online.

Artificial intelligence solutions are rapidly transforming the world by automating tasks that for long have been performed by humans solely. Training on increasingly massive datasets is one of the enablers of this widespread use of robust and trailblazing models. However, due to socioeconomic and legal restrictions, the industry lacks large-scale medical datasets to enable the development of robust AI-based healthcare solutions. Therefore, there has been an increased interest in technical solutions that can overcome such data-sharing limitations while simultaneously maintaining data security and the privacy of patients.

We will open this ICAI Deep-Dive event with an introduction to two specific data-related challenges in the medical field. The first challenge will be introduced by Bram van Ginneken of the Radboud UMC, who will discuss FAIR (Findability; Accessibility; Interoperability; and Reusability) requirements for data sharing in practice. Thereafter, Gennady Roshchupkin of the Erasmus UMC will conclude part I of the event by discussing the challenges of using Federated Learning in genomics research.

The second part of the ICAI Deep-Dive event will be a panel discussion that centralizes the question “How do we tackle challenges in medical data usage by collaborating together?”. During the panel discussion, Nancy will moderate the discussion among Bram van Ginneken, Clarisa Sánchez, Gennady Roshchupkin, Johan van Soest, and is also open to everyone who is interested in the challenges mentioned in the previous two talks.

After the panel discussion, it is time for networking while enjoying some drinks.

Registration for ICAI Day: AI & Climate Change is open!

On November 16th, 2022, ICAI organizes the ‘ICAI Day: AI & Climate Change’ This hybrid event will take place on location in Utrecht and online. Registration is now open for anyone interested.

During the first part, the Lunch Table Discussion (on-site only), from 12:00 to 13:30 hrs, you will have the opportunity to talk to others in small table settings during a catered lunch. Each table revolves around a specific topic with regard to Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change. You can choose from seven sectors: Heavy Industry and Manufacturing, Electricity Systems, Transportation/Mobility, Agriculture, Societal Adaption, Ecosystems and Biodiversity, and Markets and Finance. The seats are limited for this part, so sign up quickly.

The second part of the ICAI Day, the Plenary Session from 13:30 to 18:00 hrs, will be a hybrid setting moderated by Felienne Hermans (Leiden University). You can sign up for this plenary program physically or online. Keynote speakers Chiem van Straaten (KNMI), Elena Verdolini (EIEE, Università degli Studi di Brescia) & Ralf Herbrich (Hasso Plattner Institute) will share their insights on how Artificial Intelligence can be used to tackle Climate Change. Thereafter, there will be a panel discussion and some drinks to close the event.

Launch of The National course on AI & Ethics

On Tuesday 20 September the AI and Ethics course was launched at Startup Village in the Science Park of the University of Amsterdam. The course is a follow-up to the original Dutch National AI Course that focused on the basic building blocks of artificial intelligence. 

Jim Stolze explained during the official launch. “There were a lot of lingering questions among the participants of our first course, questions such as: ‘How do we keep it fair and how do we avoid prejudice entrenching itself in algorithms?’ To make sure that everyone understands how the sector grapples with these topics and thinks these things through for themselves, there is now the National AI Course: AI and Ethics.”

After the opening words, there was a group discussion with, among others, professor Maarten de Rijke, founder of ICAI, and distinguished professor of artificial intelligence and information retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. Maarten recounted how trustworthiness is one of the most important pillars on which a broader rollout of AI technology could rest. People will only trust AI if it proves itself worthy of that trust. This means that AI should be explainable, transparent, have reproducible results, and should be trustworthy for less prominent groups.

The way that he and his colleagues approach this issue is to try and push the gas, but make sure there are guardrails. Explicability, transparency, trustworthiness for less prominent groups, and reproducibility could be some of these guardrails.

 From left to right: Sennay Ghebreab, Mieke van Heesewijk & Quirine Eijkman

After the talk it was finally time for the official launch, Sennay Ghebreab the director of the Civic AI Lab at ICAI, Mieke van Heesewijk from the SIDN fund, and Quirine Eijkman from the Netherlands’ Institute for Human Rights had the honor to press the big red button and give the world access to the course. These three domain experts are featured in the course due to their long-standing work on human rights, AI, and ethics.

The conversation on AI and Ethics continued with some food and drinks. All attendees brought some of their experience and expertise for lively discussion and a group picture.

The course is free and accessible for everyone: https://ethiek.ai-cursus.nl

Recap of the ICAI National Social Meetup

The first ICAI national social meetup on June 30th was a lot of fun. Our community members, from scientific directors, support staff, project managers, lab managers to PhD students, all had a great time meeting people face-to-face after the two-year pandemic.

There were two locations: Amsterdam and Nijmegen. Each location had its own program and highlights. In addition to tasty food and drinks at the Amsterdam site, there was a ping-pong table where people could stretch their legs during the meetup. Community members from Wageningen and Amsterdam labs had come to the Nijmegen site to chat and chill together. We got lucky with the weather too; the rain only came after the meetup.

Thank you all for making such a great social gathering possible! We will see you again in early 2023 for the next national social meetup.

Looking back at the ICAI Day Summer Edition 2022

On June 1st, 2022, the ICAI Day ‘AI Entrepreneurship: From the lab to the market’ took place at Startup Village Amsterdam. During this edition, Dutch AI Startup experts and professionals discussed the different phases of a startup’s life cycle. Difficulties, challenges, and possible solutions were shared.

The ICAI Day started with inspiring lunch table sessions where new ideas were developed, new connections were made, and feedback was given. Afterwards during the plenary part, the speakers inspired the participants on the different elements of an AI Startup journey. From the topic how to start with an idea towards how to raise VC money. During the presentations multiple questions were discussed and answered like ‘What is more challenging: Fundraising or delivering a product/ service that fits in the market?’, and ‘Where do you find the help you need, to kick off with your start-up?’.

Thanks to all the moderators, speakers, and panel members who contributed to this event:
Anita Lieverdink, Arjan Goudsblom, Bram van Ginneken,  Chris Slootweg, Giulia Donker, Hennie Huijgens, Hinda HanedJakub ZavrelJudith Dijk, Maarten Stolk, Thijs DijkmanTristan Van Doorn, and Vladimir Nedović.

We thank all participants for their presence and contribution. We hope to see you at the next ICAI Day on November 16th, 2022!

The ICAI Day summer edition 2022 was sponsored by Startup Amsterdam.

Partners were Thematic Technology Transfer Artificial Intelligence (TTT-AI) and Startup Village Amsterdam

For more ICAI Day videos, please click here.

Coming up: The National course on AI & Ethics

The National AI course will be continued! More than 300,000 people have been reached since its launch in 2018. This course explains the basics of artificial intelligence in an understandable way. A special course on AI and Ethics will be launched after this summer.

This new course focuses on topics such as algorithmic bias, combating disinformation, the power of tech companies and the importance of human rights in the digital world.

With experts from many walks of life the course wants to raise awareness around the pitfalls of digitization and stimulate the debate on human-centered AI. Experts include Sennay Ghebreab (ICAI), José van Dijck (Utrecht University), Mieke van Heesewijk (SIDN Fund), Merel Koning (Amnesty International), Quirine Eijkman (College for Human Rights) and Sander Duivestein (author of Echt Nep).

Upon completion of this free online program, the student will receive a certificate.

After summer, the course can be found at https://ethiek.ai-cursus.nl.

TTT-AI Workshop: Setting up an AI Startup

On July 5th, 2022, The Thematic Technology Transfer – Artificial Intelligence (TTT-AI) will organize a two-hour workshop on setting up an AI startup.

TTT-AI offers a specialized venture-building program and investment fund for knowledge/research-based AI startups. During this two-hour workshop at the University of Amsterdam, you’ll get a clear understanding of the different aspects an AI startup will go through. Topics include technology development, product-market fits, team formation, customer relations, IP protection, the startup lifecycle, funding, and many more. During the workshop, the presenters will not only teach you some important tools, but will also use and experiment with them. To end the workshop, TTT-AI invited two successful startups to share their best practices and answer some of your questions.

Please send an email to Giulia Donker (g.donker@uva.nl) if you want to come to the workshop.

Registration for ICAI Day: AI Entrepreneurship is open!

On June 1st, 2022, ICAI organizes the ‘ICAI Day: AI Entrepreneurship – From the lab to the market.’ This hybrid event will take place on location in Amsterdam and online. Registration is now open for everybody interested.

During the first part, the Lunch Table Discussion, from 12:00 to 13:30 hrs, you will have the opportunity to talk to others in small table settings during a catered lunch. Each table revolves around one sector on “The life cycle of a Startup.” You can choose from five sectors: healthcare, service industry, robotics, public domain, and transportation/mobility. There is a maximum amount of seats available for this part, so sign up quickly.

The second of the ICAI Day, the Plenary Session from 13:30 to 17:30 hrs, will be a hybrid event moderated by Desiree Hoving. You can sign up for this plenary program both physically and online. Keynote speakers Chris Slootweg (UvA) and Hinda Haned (Civic AI lab, UvA) will share their insights on going from lab to market. There will be talks by TTT-AI, Venture Capital, and TechLeap.nl. We will end the event with a panel discussion and closing drinks.

Find the program here and register here.