The 10th European Communication Summit took place on July 7 and 8 at the Square Meeting Center in Brussels.
The European Communication Summit is an annual two-day-conference in Brussels gathering leading in-house communication professionals. Participants come from the fields of business, politics, associations and media from all over Europe.
The 10th European Communication Summit focused not only on the purpose and societal context of business but also on businesses’ licence to operate.
More than 80 top speakers held presentations and discussions during the Summit. Participants had the opportunity to debate strategies, tools, methods and best cases within the fields of strategic communication, reputation management, crisis communication, public affairs, storytelling or brand management.
Th event was co-hosted by the European Association of Communication Directors (EACD) and Communication Director magazine.
Our deep learning artificial neural networks have won numerous contests in pattern recognition and machine learning. They are now widely used by the world’s most valuable public companies. Jürgen Schmidhuber, Co-Director & Professor of AI (Swiss AI Lab IDSIA & University of Lugano), discussed latest state-of-the-art results in numerous applications, and outline how AI would transform every aspect of our civilisation.
Everything will change
Following a set of breakout sessions and a delicious buffet away from the Gold Hall, participants were drawn back into the main conference room by the promise of hearing about the true potential of artificial intelligence (AI) from Professor Jürgen Schmidhuberof Swiss AI Lab IDSIA & University of Lugano – they were not disappointed. Armed with dry humour and an unflappable nature Schmidhuber went about explaining the nature of deep learning artificial networks with a few deadpan wisecracks thrown in.
Schmidhuber suggested the most obvious example of AI currently available to most of us, is the technology that drives the speech recognition in our smartphones. While the improvements in such technology in recent years are impressive enough, we are set to experience a lot more development in an incredibly short time.
We are now at the stage where AI will be designed to mimic animal intelligence. With this ability to learn to think and plan hierarchically, “AI will be smarter than humans within this century.”
Statements such as this caused some alarm in the room but Schmidhuber put these concerns to rest during the Q&A session, arguing that such intelligent entities will have little concern with human goals – thus avoiding the need for a Hollywood-style robot against human battle.
Fingers crossed.
http://www.eacd-online.eu/insights/blog/european-communication-summit-day-1-review