ICAI: Challenges and ambitions from two perspectives
Three years ago a couple of scientific researchers had an idea: stimulating AI talent in the Netherlands with bottom-up innovation and a lot of relevant stakeholders. ICAI was born. Now ICAI is growing significantly. It has 24 labs and is aiming at 40 to 50 labs by the end of 2022. What has ICAI achieved so far? And what are the challenges and ambitions? A view on ICAI from the perspective of lab manager Elvan Kula and scientific director Maarten de Rijke.
Elvan Kula – Lab Manager and PhD student at AI for Fintech Research lab (a collaboration of TU Delft and ING)
“It would be a nice
opportunity to perform studies
across ICAI labs.“
Accomplishments
‘The first year of our lab was focused on bootstrapping AI for Fintech Research, which involved setting up the tracks, hiring people, organizing publicity and establishing awareness within ING. We have successfully set up a lab with 10 PhD students. In the beginning we had to make the stakeholders at ING aware or our lab and how we contribute to the company. Now, a year later, I feel like we have reached the sweet spot within the organisation where the stakeholders come to us with their own research ideas and ask if they can collaborate.’
Organizational challenge
‘As a lab manager I bring many different groups of collaborators together. I identify research opportunities, in close collaboration with engineers, researchers, students and professors from ING and TU Delft. One of the main challenges is managing important logistical aspects of the research projects in our lab. While research can be very unpredictable, our stakeholders at ING do want to have a clear plan on the deliverables and the timeline. As the lab manager, I plan and manage these expectations to deal with the unpredictability in research.’
Future challenge
‘One of the main challenges of our lab is scaling AI’s impact across the bank. The current research projects in our lab focus on standalone use cases that create impact for a specific team or department at ING. In the upcoming years, we want to work towards diffusing and scaling AI throughout the bank. Achieving results at scale requires us to deal with some technical challenges related to legacy systems and the fragmentation of data.’
Innovation
‘The main advantage of doing research within industry is that you get access to real world problems and large amounts of real world data. It allows us to do research that has practical applications and that is truly impactful. In the context of ING there are close to 14 million customers, 15.000 engineers in more than 600 teams. We have the opportunity to do research that helps thousands of people. Another benefit is that we work closely with a lot of people at ING that have much experience in the world of industry and business. We can learn a lot from them and they learn a lot from us.’
Expectations
‘Advances in AI are redefining the way the financial services sector is using data analytics and new technologies. With millions of customers and thousands of employees worldwide, the expectation is that AI will play an increasingly important role in ING’s business and operations. As the lab manager, I want to continue to strengthen the partnership between ING and TU Delft to support the ongoing transformation of the bank.’
Focus of ICAI
‘It would be a nice opportunity to perform studies across ICAI labs. The PhD students in our lab work on a range of topics, such as software analytics, data integration and fairness in machine learning, that are relevant to other companies as well. It would be very interesting to replicate our research in other ICAI labs and see how our findings relate to the results obtained at other companies.’
Maarten de Rijke – Co-founder and Scientific Director of ICAI
“What I want to leave behind is
the attitude that making relevant
technological progress is a
shared responsibility.“
Accomplishments
‘I’m really proud of the energy that ICAI has been able to generate and continues to generate. We are a supersmall team and we want to stay small. But by now, there are 24 labs and over 150 researchers throughout the country involved. And it’s all their initiative. We just facilitate it. The labs have created new ways of working, new ways of tackling problems and new types of teams. ICAI has a minimal but important set of requirements. First: Take care of your talent, the PhD students. And second: Take care of your environment, so share the knowledge and publish openly. And people do that in really creative ways. With training programs for professionals for example. Or with big industrial lab setups.’
Organizational challenge
‘Our dream, based on bottom-up innovation happening, has been an experiment. You think up a format and you adjust it as you go along. The challenges had to do with: how big should this be? How can we manage this? How do we organize communication? How do we make sure that it’s as open as we want it to be, while also providing enough benefits for early stage investors?’
Future challenge
‘The first step within ICAI was to get the resources so that we can attract and train talent. Now we’re at the stage that we need to think about how we can retain the talent. As our first labs begin to graduate their PhD students, we want those PhD students to find their next step somewhere in the country. For that we have created the Launch Pad. We want to open up the window so that they all see that plenty of interesting opportunities are nearby: in industry, at start-ups, NGO’s, government, academia. Their talent and expertise are needed everywhere.’
Innovation
‘The new thing that we do with ICAI, is making innovation and high-risk investment a shared responsibility. What we want to change is that companies too are investing in high-risk early stage research that is in a very low technology readiness level. Innovation is not just something governments need to think about. We all need to think about this. This whole development is also about making sure we have enough capability and capacity so that we can build and come up with innovative solutions to tough problems in the Netherlands. It’s about building and maintaining a decent level of technological autonomy. And that goes against big developments of the last decade that were focused on outsourcing. But I think that for this kind of AI technology where so many answers are still unknown, you have to experiment yourself. Because you have to have enough knowhow and talent. Otherwise you’re going to end up making big mistakes.’
Focus of ICAI
‘We have always had a strong focus on technological and economic impact. We still continue to have that focus, but in the long run our goals aren’t technological. They aren’t economic. They are societal. Our technological ambitions are aligned with the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). These societal goals are extremely hard and require high-risk investments by all stakeholders involved: government, industry, knowledge institutes, society. This has been in the ICAI DNA from the start. Our labs on AI and health or AI for retail or agriculture obviously contribute to these SDG’s. But the same holds true for our labs that focus on AI for better machine perception, with less data and higher precision. And we recently opened our Responsible AI Lab, the Civic AI Lab and the Cultural AI Lab. That’s where we’re heading. Empowering teams of private and public partners to help address those big challenges with the knowledge and talent that we develop.’
Text: Reineke Maschhaupt