Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has highlighted the vast strides that have been made in female empowerment since taking office in December 2012 as he tried to shift the narrative from the huge elephant in the room: Japan’s woeful track record in gender equality.
Despite his vow before the United Nations in 2013 to “build a society where women can shine”, Japan still has some way to go, as seen from its lowly 110th placing in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index of 149 nations last year.
It was also 165th out of 193 countries in female parliamentary representation, according to a survey done in January. Mr. Abe also named just one female minister to his 19-member Cabinet in October last year.
Still, the PM told the Women 20 (W-20) Summit on Saturday (March 23), a prelude to the Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Osaka in June, that the active female employment rate has risen by 8.9 percentage points in six years, with more than 2.8 million women have joined – or rejoined – the workforce.
“Japan’s economy has grown over 10 percent in the last six years, and the main engine is Womenomics,” he said, adding that the attitudinal shift was a result for his push for drastic reforms in childcare and working style.
The Boston Global Forum honored Prime Minister Abe with a World Leader in Cybersecurity Award 2015 during Global Cybersecurity Day on December 12, 2015 at Harvard University Faculty Club.
This is a prize awarded annually to honor world leaders who have made outstanding contributions to making the cyber world safer.
AI will shape our future in many ways. Medill Reports recently published a report about how three AI companies are developing AI-powered voice assistants to improve order-taking at drive-through restaurants.
Drive-through windows make up about 70 percent of fast-food chains’ sales, according to a recent study from QSR Magazine. The industry, however, is facing a serious workforce shortage. According to the 2018 MIT Technology Review, the workforce turnover in the fast-food industry jumped to a record high of 150 percent. Consequence? Longer wait time.
One company, Valyant AI, has piloted one assistant to take breakfast orders at an eatery in Colorado, which experienced a 10% to 25% reduction in average wait time. Meanwhile, Encounter AI’s assistant is designed to improve order accuracy, so food allergies and other potential problems are not overlooked. The software firm Clinc hopes to augment the voice control capabilities of drive-through windows with its own AI, which learns from the different ways people order by analyzing sentence structure.
The potential benefits advertised by these AI companies are plentiful, including faster speed, improved accuracy, customized upsell, higher profitability, and enhanced customer service. So the next time when you shout into the ordering box at a drive-through, you might not be talking to a human but an automated order taker. See Medill Reports’ full article here.
The World Leader for Peace and Cybersecurity Award for 2018
President Sauli Niinistö – President of the Republic of Finland received the World Leader for Peace and Cybersecurity Award from the Boston Global Forum (BGF) and the Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI). He was honored during Global Cybersecurity Day, which is observed on December 12 each year.
The goal of Global Cybersecurity Day is to inspire the shared responsibility of the world’s citizens to protect the Internet’s safety and transparency. This year’s conference revolved around the theme “AI solutions solve disinformation“. During the discussion, experts explored the current state of cybersecurity and the threat posed by disinformation, anonymous sources and fake news as well as the role AI can play as an effective defense mechanism against these threats to truth and the principles of democracy.
Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Chairman and Co-founder of BGF & MDI, moderated this year’s event.
President Niinistö was presented with the World Leader for Peace and Cybersecurity Award for his leadership role in establishing Finland as a vital member of the world community and his support of The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. In this role, he has fostered the understanding of, and solutions to the numerous threats we face from political forces, economic instability, military intervention, civil unrest, climate change, and unsafe Internet practices.
In a video message presented at the Global Cybersecurity Day Symposium, President Niinistö expressed his honor to receive this award and emphasized the importance of cooperation between nations to tackle the issues related to ongoing cyberthreats. “To increase national cybersecurity, all nations need to do their upmost to increase awareness among their citizens in all sectors of society. In cyberspace, we need to strengthen our cooperation between nations and rules over international borders,” said President Niinistö.
He said that he hopes the establishment of an intergovernmental think tank— The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats—will make our society more secure. In conclusion he also highlighted the role of women in the era of rapid technological development. “Unlocking their full potential is crucial for our success as an international community. We should educate and advocate more young women to become active in this field. It will make us better prepared to profit from the immense opportunity that the digital era affords us.”
To guarantee the interoperability among different frameworks and approaches of governments, given the conditions of uncertainty and complexity in the AI ecosystem, Boston Global Forum – Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (BGF-MDI) published AIWS Report on AI Ethics and proposed the model for Government AIWS Ethics and Practices Index. Also, BGF-MDI cooperated with AI World to form a strategic alliance host of the AI World Government Conference & Expo, on June 24 to 26, 2019, Washington, D.C.
Last week, the Center for Data Innovation released a survey that include the following questions:
Agree or disagree?
Technological innovations, like artificial intelligence and robotics, will make the world a better place.
Technological innovations, like artificial intelligence and robotics, will make the workers better off in the future.
Only 31 percent of women agreed with the first statement and only 27% agreed with the second statement. In contrast, these numbers are 41% and 36% for men. There is a clear gender divide.
The report mentioned some reasons for women’s pessimism towards new technologies. A crucial one is that “women do not expect the private sector to ensure they fully benefit from advances in AI”. In fact, there are noticeable gaffes in technology products ignoring women’s needs.
How do we go from here? Many tech companies have already taken notice, including the powerhouses such as Apple and Amazon. They add features to make products more suitable for women’s use.
Another way to do this is by increasing gender diversity among those working in AI. The AI World Society strongly supports this direction. We should involve the government, policy makers, and the private sectors. The US cannot win the global AI race if inclusiveness and diversity are not at the forefront of every effort.
“Alexa won’t be replacing doctors anytime soon, but Amazon says AI can help hospitals become more efficient.”
Amazon recently announced that its Amazon Web Services unit is working with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard University, to test how medical care can be made more efficient with AI. Several day-to-day tasks can be simplified, including booking of operating rooms, prediction of scheduled appointments being missed, and searching for patient records and content forms. Amazon’s AI technologies have been used in more than 41 operating rooms, according to John Halamka, an executive director at Beth Israel Lahey Health.
Health care is a $3.5 trillion market in America, where many inefficiencies result in high costs straining the budgets of families, employers and governments. This move by Amazon is the latest sign of powerhouse tech companies, Google being one of the others, deepening their reach into this attractive market. Google is betting that the future of healthcare is going to be structured data and AI. The company is applying AI to disease detection, new data infrastructure, and potentially insurance.
This is Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s first collaboration with Amazon. The company gave the hospital a grant worth $2 million to experiment with AI, hoping that this kind of project will ultimately give patients a more tailored experience, similar to what amazon.com provides to online consumers.
The promise and importance of AI in health care are unquestionable. At the AI World Society (AIWS), we, however, are interested to see how the work of Amazon addresses AI privacy and ethics, especially when dealing with special customers like the patients in the hospital. Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, founder of AIWS, noted, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world we live in, from work to recreation, from healthcare to education, from governance to social interaction. But understanding the relationship between AI and society from an ethical perspective is a must.”
