United Nations : Eminent technology experts hailing from India have been named to the new 39-member global advisory body announced by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to support the international community's efforts to govern artificial intelligence.
The High-Level Multistakeholder Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, announced by the UN Chief here Thursday, brings together experts from government, the private sector, the research community, civil society, and academia, and is focused on building a global scientific consensus on risks and challenges, helping harness AI for the Sustainable Development Goals, and strengthening international cooperation on AI governance, a statement said.
-
I am stoked to share that I am among the select individuals around the world who would take on the *huge* responsibility of serving on the @UN's AI Advisory Board along with some prominent individuals including @miramurati @LatifaMKarim @HKitano Sharad Sharma, and many more.… pic.twitter.com/t6OIdOqsjY
— Nazneen Rajani (@nazneenrajani) October 26, 2023 " class="align-text-top noRightClick twitterSection" data="
">I am stoked to share that I am among the select individuals around the world who would take on the *huge* responsibility of serving on the @UN's AI Advisory Board along with some prominent individuals including @miramurati @LatifaMKarim @HKitano Sharad Sharma, and many more.… pic.twitter.com/t6OIdOqsjY
— Nazneen Rajani (@nazneenrajani) October 26, 2023I am stoked to share that I am among the select individuals around the world who would take on the *huge* responsibility of serving on the @UN's AI Advisory Board along with some prominent individuals including @miramurati @LatifaMKarim @HKitano Sharad Sharma, and many more.… pic.twitter.com/t6OIdOqsjY
— Nazneen Rajani (@nazneenrajani) October 26, 2023
The Indian experts on the advisory body are Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh Gill; co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation Sharad Sharma and Lead Researcher at Hugging Face, India Nazneen Rajani.
Prior to his appointment as the Secretary General's Envoy on Technology, Gill was the CEO of the International Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Research Collaborative (I-DAIR) project, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Previously, he was the Executive Director and Co-Lead of the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (2018-2019). Gill was India's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva (2016-2018).
Sharad Sharma co-founded iSPIRT, a non-profit technology think tank that has conceptualised India Stack, Health Stack, and other digital public goods. He also co-founded Teltier Technologies, a wireless infrastructure startup now part of CISCO. An active angel investor with over two dozen investments, he was instrumental in the success of India's first IP-focused fund, the India Innovation Fund. He is a member of the National Startup Advisory Council, Securities and Exchange Board of India's (SEBI) Financial and Regulatory Technology Committee and chairs the International Financial Services Centres Authority's (IFSCA) Expert Committee on Asset Tokenization and the Taskforce on Digital Public Infrastructure in the ThinkTank20 (T20) group of G20.
Nazneen Rajani is the Research Lead at Hugging Face, specialising in AI Safety and Alignment, leveraging Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). She is recognised as an expert and thought leader in Large Language Models (LLMs) robustness and evaluation. Before her tenure at HuggingFace, Nazneen successfully led a team of esteemed researchers at Salesforce Research, dedicated to developing robust natural language generation systems built upon LLMs, according to her profile.
Rajani earned her Doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where her research focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the interpretability of Machine Learning models. She has over 40 publications in premier conferences and her research has garnered significant attention from prominent media outlets.
Also Read : UN chief appoints 39-member panel to advise on international governance of artificial intelligence
Other members of the advisory body include President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, US Vilas Dhar; President and Founder of Eurasia Group Ian Bremmer; Special Advisor to the Minister of Justice and Public Security, Federal Government of Brazil Estela Aranha; Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence of Spain Carme Artigas; Chief Innovation Officer and Deputy Director General at Clalit Health Services Israel Ran Balicer; Aerospace Coordinator of the German Federal Government Anna Christmann; Chief Responsible AI Officer at Microsoft Natasha Crampton and Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo Arisa Ema.
Guterres said the transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp. And we are in urgent need of this enabler and accelerator, he said.
He noted that many countries are already reeling from the impact of the climate crisis. The 2030 Agenda our global blueprint for peace and prosperity on a healthy planet is in deep trouble.
AI could help to turn that around. It could supercharge climate action and efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, he said adding that all this depends on AI technologies being harnessed responsibly, and made accessible to all including the developing countries that need them most.
