eolas Magazine

At the Public Sector Digital Transformation Awards 2024, Government Chief Information Officer (CIO) Barry Lowry won the Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding contribution to public service over the course of his career to date. In November 2023, he spoke to Joshua Murray about the public sector’s use of artificial intelligence and how this can be better understood and regulated. Link available in the post below. 📷 = Noel Hillis

Can Ireland bring back its forests while protecting biodiversity? Southern Scientific Services Ltd ecologist Colette Murray examines the history of Ireland's forest cover. Discover what went wrong with past afforestation efforts and how the new 2023-2027 forestry plan aims to fix these issues. The full article below appears in the 2024 Environment Ireland Yearbook, introduced by Minister Eamon Ryan: https://lnkd.in/eQS7uty2

BearingPoint is proud to sponsor #AIForum2024 powered by eolas Magazine, taking place today in Dublin City.   Chaired by Claudia Carr, this conference will bring together stakeholders to examine all the key issues related to AI and the transformative effects it will have on organisations.   Stephen Redmond, Director of Data Analytics and AI at BearingPoint, presents on the Augmented Organisation and how companies can accelerate their journey to becoming fully augmented.   We've heard insightful discussions from a range of industry experts so far this morning, and it's clear that AI innovation in the public sector is alive and kicking.   #BearingPointIreland #AI

It has been an very interesting day at the eolas Magazine AI Forum. Some excellent presentations, topped off with a great panel discussion on scaling #AI for #PublicService. Excellent chairing job through a long day Claudia Carr! It was my great pleasure to present some of the findings from the BearingPoint Survey on Augmented Organisations. Check out the full results here: https://lnkd.in/epSfrRJZ #BearingPointIreland

What a pleasure to chair the #AIForumIRL today. Huge thanks to all the many fantastic speakers, delegates, the team at eolas Magazine, and other sponsors. Big shout out to our own Linda Gilchrist for looking after me so well. Today's presentations were packed with insights but there were some recurring themes. At the core of it all was the emphasis on #skills, #trust, and #governance in the #AI-augmented organisation. AI holds immense potential to boost efficiencies, but managing change is crucial to unlocking its benefits. #bearingpointireland #futureofwork #GenAi

So pleased I attended the eolas Magazine #AIForumIRL in Dublin yesterday (https://aiforum.ie/). It was a really fascinating and well balanced event, with excellent contributions from Government, the EU Commission, Technology developers and solution providers, academia and real world use cases, from those who have or need to consider deployment of AI and emerging tech. There was real depth and quality in the subject matter covered at the AI Forum. Some key takeaways for me: > The EU AI Act – while extensive and risk focused (and there are significant risk areas to cover with this technology), it aims to be proportionate and to support innovation rather than hinder it. It will be important we keep that ‘spirit of the law’ in mind as the legislation comes fully into effect in the coming years. > Governance, Strategic vision and investment, and Empowering people with safe spaces to experiment, find use cases and build capability are all key building blocks to have in place. These all help to establish trust in the use of the technology in both public and privates sectors. > AI is not new, there is a substantial body of research work, knowledge and expertise in academia and industry we should look to draw on and partner with to help use AI for good, and address the big challenges that still exist > Ethics, Sustainability, Accountability, Bias are all major areas that pose significant risks and challenges to society if AI is embraced without governance and controls. There is much, and a need for much more, research in these areas. > There are some great examples of early adopters in typically risk-averse areas such as the public sector, from the growing interest in applying AI in the form of Chatbots, to assist with citizen facing services, to predicting TB outbreaks in the national herd. > DATA is the key. It is vital to know what data you have and what data will be used by any AI technology you intend to deploy. Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity are the key aspects for organisations to harness their data for emerging tech. > The hype is recent, on foot the release of generative AI applications that have made it accessible to the masses as it were, through applications that are easy to use and helpful with everyday admin tasks. But for experts in the field at the heart of all the hype is still a pattern matching based technology, and not necessarily the Deep Learning AI that mirrors human intelligence which is the holy grail of AI researchers. > However, AI is unusual in that its adoption is being driven from the bottom up. Individuals in various capacities (citizens, customers, employees etc.) are adopting it faster than most organisations. This can increase the rate of real world benefits and risks that are materialising, and perhaps the ensuing increased investment will drive even faster pace of further innovation in this space. So who knows what’s next really! Well done eolas Magazine and all involved.

Our final session at the #AIForumIRL is a panel discussion, discussing scaling AI for our public services. Colin Flaherty, Department of Public Expenditure NDP Delivery & Reform Damian Griffin , Irish Defence Forces Carmel O'Hare, Monaghan County Council (Ireland) David Wall, Tallaght University Hospital John Lonsdale, CeDAR Dónal Harford, AMD

Derick Mitchell, Chief Executive of the IPPOSI, talks about the use of AI in healthcare in Ireland. #AIForumIRL He says that IPPOSI has created public education programmes by using citizens' juries to garner where public stances are on the use of AI, with the result being that there is now a blueprint on how to integrate citizens' thought on a complex topic.

Conor Judge, University of Galway, talks about AI powered technology to improve the delivery of healthcare. He talks about a medical device which is able to autonomously examine chest x-rays. Says if it found one of 75 things it was trained to find, that the X-ray would be able to report it and share its tasks with medical staff. While it will not be able to find the same amount of things as a trained consultant, it is able to recognise a chest x-ray with normal results. He says that, right now in Irish hospitals, AI is being used through Deep Resolve technology, which is used for MRI scans. The technology is able to take raw information from the MRI scan and make the same image with less data, making the scanning process 73 per cent faster. It is also used in natural language processing, where the gains have been realised through use of Deep learning and the transformer network.

Our third expert panel at the inaugural #AIForumIRL Mairéad Pratschke, PhD, The University of Manchester Catherine Dempsey, Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine Conor Judge, University of Galway Derick Mitchell, IPPOSI Pictured with panel chair Claudia Carr, BearingPoint Ireland and Ciarán Galway, editor of eolas Magazine