Dr.  Tarek R. Besold

Dr. Tarek R. Besold is an experienced researcher, innovator and communicator at the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, working on a broad range of topics from trustworthy AI (including explainable AI and privacy-preserving AI) to cognitive systems and computational creativity.

His past and present roles in academia and industry include the position of Chief Science Officer of Alpha Health in Barcelona (leading a multidisciplinary team of researchers, designers and engineers developing digital mental health solutions within Telefonica’s moonshot factory Telefonica Innovation Alpha), a role as scientific advisor to the Berlin-based AI-safety start-up Neurocat, and an appointment as Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Data Science at City, University of London. 

In addition to his professional activities, Tarek holds positions as chairman of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN)’s National Working Group on Standards and Norms for AI and as a member of the AI Expert Council of Microsoft Germany. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier) and is a frequent reviewer for high-profile AI and Cognitive Science conferences and journals.

Tarek is a member of the ACM SIGAI (ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence). More information can be found on http://www.cat-ai.org or on Twitter under @jeublanc.

• Creativity Computational and Otherwise -- The science and the fiction
  Computational Creativity -- treating with systems that exhibit behaviours that observers would deem creative -- has been garnering increasing attention over the last few years. In this talk we...
• Developing Trustworthy AI for the 21st Century - An Applied View
  AI-based systems are becoming more and more ubiquituous in our daily life, from smart home assistants and voice recognition in smartphones to AI-supported medical devices and autonomous vehicles....
• Developing digital solutions to the mental health challenges of the 21st century
  Mental health is one of the big challenges of the 21st century, both on an individual and on a societal level. A growing number of groups in industry and academia are currently developping digital...
• Symbols, Networks, Explanations - A complicated menage a trois
  Discussions surrounding questions of interpretability (or even: explainability) in AI and ML are gaining in popularity in academia and industry. I will briefly characterise four notions of...
• What are you talking about HAL? The Why, the What and the How of Explainable AI.
  Discussions surrounding questions of interpretability (or even: explainability) in AI and ML are gaining in popularity in academia and industry. In this talk we will have a look at desiderata...