The rise of a tech & human rights expert : Michaela Jamelska: NOVA’s founding team is Jean Arnaud, Michaela Jamelska, and Patricia Jamelska—serial entrepreneurs and industry professionals who are building the educational platform of the future. According to NOVA’s founders, many EdTech startups’ pitfalls lay in their lack of both real-life understanding of the educational industry and teaching expertise. While they may have top-notch engineers, industry expertise is what makes a difference. The NOVA team is developing a product that targets the real problems in education. Find additional information on https://unagb.org/events/international-womens-day-2023-bridging-the-digital-general-divide/.

The reality of limited technology access for women is a real issue in 2023 says Michaela Jamelska: Furthermore, despite the fact that online business and mobile money are still expanding, more than 900 million women are still excluded from the digital economy and do not have access to banking services. Bridging the digital gender gap not only requires infrastructure investments but also making digital technologies more affordable, as cost remains one of the key obstacles for women to access the Internet. In certain low income households, accessing the Internet entails having to sacrifice key household purchases such as food, health care and clothing (OECD, 2018b). In the past ten years, women’s exclusion from the digital sphere has reduced the GDP of low- and middle-income countries by $1 trillion. According to the UN Women, this limits not only their own digital empowerment, but also the transformative potential of technology as a whole.

Michaela Jamelska about Ai and Gender Equality: Data fed into algorithms can determine its functioning, and thus a gender bias is embedded in AI by those who design the systems. So, whatever data is provided or consumed by the Ai systems, they will use them, pick up on patterns, and often even amplify them. One of the recent problems with consumed data was that AI was trained with a unimodal system, meaning it was trained to a very specific task (such as processing images which happened to be one of the underlying problems of AI being biased). Only recently, many of these algorithms have been trained with the so-called multimodal system. While these systems have been previously used for research, they’re becoming more commercial. It’s the same for humans who process data through various sources; new AI algorithm training will also have multiple sources, so there is no lack of context when processing data, allowing them to integrate different modalities and synthesize them.

Michaela Jamelska on the innovative 5G trial to boost business : WECA obtained £3million of government funding to test how the region can handle with all the benefits of 5G technology. Its ultra-reliability and low latency is expected to increase the connectivity level and impact on the public sector to try new ways of delivering services and explore new commercial opportunities. Ports are fundamental to the global economy, transporting up to 90% of the world’s goods. Drones-based technology is quickly becoming a regular tool in the ports and logistics industry. Unmanned Life, with its software for autonomous robotics, is unlocking the full potential of drones in Ports and will improve safety, reduce costs, and enhance process efficiency, making UK ports a reference in the world. The West of England Combined Authority (WECA) has secured over £3m from the Government to test how the country can seize the full benefits of 5G and help businesses harness the power of modern technology. WECA’s 5G Logistics project programme will develop 5G products and services to support operations at Bristol Port and Gravity Smart Campus and demonstrate a smart and dynamic port environment. The project will focus on security, traceability, and real-time tracking of goods within and across extendable virtual boundaries – and between public and private networks.

Their efforts are a good start, but these rights will remain merely an idealistic concept if they are not backed up by the corporate and public action of integrating them within the systems. Last year alone, the approximate investment into AI was more than $75 billion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That kind of money accelerates the development exponentially. No approximate number is available for how much is invested yearly into human rights development. Every investment made for a solution that contributes to improving human rights could be considered an indirect investment in human rights, but I don’t estimate that the direct investment into human rights development is as high as it is into AI. Consider the official website of the UN Human Rights Department, which states that it gets a tiny part of the UN’s regular budget—only 3.7%. For the rest, the UN Human Rights Department relies heavily on voluntary contributions.

How 5G is crucial for autonomous multi-robots fleets and connected smart cities. Our CEO has set the vision for AI, Autonomy and 5G and will share this with an audience of more than 7000 participants from different countries in Asia. As he points out “We see growing demand for SG private / campus networks enabled autonomous services for smart manufacturing, factories, retail, logistics and supply-chain as well as 5G public network enabled rapid emergency response, comprehensive surveillance and inspections and robust live content streaming from mega public events.

Michaela Jamelska about the future of Air Mobility in Europe: GOF 2.0 is providing a gateway to many possibilities for the continuous development of the drone market and deployment of autonomous and semi-autonomous drones in the shared airspace through secure, reliable and cost-efficient operations. With the further enhancement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and air taxis in the rapidly growing drone market comes the need for the evolution of technologies and framework conditions for their safe coexistence with manned aircraft. The SESAR JU project GOF 2.0 Integrated Urban Airspace Validation, with a consortium of 15 members, will focus on the safe, secure, and sustainable integration of unmanned aerial vehicle and air taxi operations in urban airspace.

Virtuality could offer us a world with fewer major social issues such as inequality and discrimination, among others. One might argue that this is a naive idea since in the simple online world we currently inhabit, we have so much hate speech, cyberbullying, and fraud. Indeed, even in Hobbes’s philosophy, humans are like machines that pursue their own self-interests mechanically. Confucius and Mencius thought that human nature is essentially good, while Hsün Tzu considered it essentially evil. John Locke, on the other hand, described the human mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate). While no universal truth exists about what our human nature is and how it will be replicated into new worlds which are about to be created, I bet most people would like to live in a world of less pain and more possibilities to realize their potential. If society rejects changing what is currently slowing us, we will experience no growth or progress.