Intercontinental Academia 4 "Intelligence and artificial intelligence"
Hosted by Paris IAS and Belo Horizonte IEAT
June 2021-November 2022
The ICA seeks to create a global network of future research leaders by constructing an arena in which the very best early/mid-career scholars will work together on paradigm-shifting cross-disciplinary research, mentored by some of the most eminent researchers from across the globe. A key aspect is deriving the full benefit of the intercontinental origins of the endeavor and diversity of thought and culture. This immersive and intense experience is expected to transform the scholar's own approach to research, enhance their awareness of the work, relevance and potential impact of other disciplines, and to inspire and facilitate new collaborations between distant disciplines; our aim is to make a real, yet volatile, intellectual cocktail that leads to meaningful outputs.
The structure: The academia was based around two intensive workshops which provided space for learning about the inward perspective of each "subject", performing a comparative analysis of the panorama and searching for correlations among these different views and perspectives. The scholars were guided during these workshops by an array of mentors who were themselves some of the most outstanding disciplinary and interdisciplinary researchers of our time. Within the programme, the scholars had the space to define the workshop structure and the outputs from the project.
The theme: Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence was selected as the last decades have witnessed an impressive progress in cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Beside the decisive scientific advances that have been accomplished, among other major developments, in the analysis of brain activity and its behavioral counterparts or in the information processing sciences (machine learning, wearable sensors…), and the many open fascinating issues, several fundamental and broader questions of deep interdisciplinary nature have been arising. In first place, as AI and neuroscience/cognitive science seem to show significant complementarities, a first question was to inquire to which extent these complementarities should drive research in both areas and how to optimize synergies. In addition, the fantastic progress in these areas has raised a series of major ethical and societal questions, and tremendous challenges for humanity as a whole.
A group of 15 high-level mentors and of 19 early/mid-career researchers (within 15 years of achieving their PhD) was assembled by an international and multidisciplinary Steering Committee.
Four meeting were organized:
- Online presentation meeting, June 2021
- ICA 4 session in Paris, October 2021
- ICA 4 interim meeting in Birmingham, September 2022
- ICA 4 session in Belo Horizonte, November 2022
A collective paper was published in June 2023 and is available here.
