The UN has named the 40 members of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. Among them are TUM professor Johanna Pirker, Maximilian Nickel (Meta), as well as Bernhard Schölkopf and Mennatallah El-Assady from ETH Zurich.
The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI will examine the global opportunities and risks of AI from a scientific perspective, thereby providing a sound basis for political and societal decision-making. According to the UN, there were over 2,600 applicants, from which the 40 members of the panel were ultimately selected.
“We now have a multidisciplinary group of leading AI experts from across the globe, geographically diverse and gender-balanced, who will provide independent and impartial assessments of AI’s opportunities, risks and impacts — including to the new Global Dialogue on AI Governance,” states UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Among the 40 panel members are four individuals with ties to German-speaking countries. From the perspective of the gaming industry, the appointment of Johanna Pirker is particularly interesting. The Austrian took up a professorship in N-Dimensional User Experience at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in the middle of last year. Pirker is also a part-time professor of computer science at Graz University of Technology.
Before Pirker moved to Graz, where she was also director of GameLabGraz, she had already spent time at the Technical University of Munich. Other stops in her career include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich. Two other members of the panel are currently active there: Bernhard Schölkopf, who helped found the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the ELLIS society, and is a professor at ETH Zurich. And Mennatallah El-Assady, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, where she leads the Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation (IVIA) lab.
Last but not least, German Maximilian Nickel has also been appointed to the UN panel. Nickel is Research Director at Meta, an award-winning scientist, and Program Chair of a leading AI conference.
