From November 22nd, 2019 to November 24th, 2019 “KI & WIR *”, the first convention on artificial intelligence and gender, was held in the Festung Mark Magdeburg. In the course of the Science Year 2019, a varied program with lectures, discussions, workshops, lectures, films and other hands-on offers took place over three days, in which there was a lot of new things to learn and discover for our guests.

To the website of the KI & Wir * Convention ’19

Friday

The convention was started on November 22nd, 2019 with a conversation between Prof. Dr.-Ing Ina Schieferdecker (Federal Ministry of Education and Research), Thomas Wünsch (Ministry of Economics, Science and Digitization Saxony-Anhalt), Prof. Dr. Andreas Nürnberger (Otto von Guericke University) and Prof. Dr. Jens Strackeljan (Rector of Otto von Guericke University) on the subject of artificial intelligence and gender.

The moderator Katrin Fritsch, founder of the think tank motif – Institute for Digital Culture, guided us through the day and through various lectures.

First we heard a lecture by Kristina Penner (AlgorithmWatch), who told us about the “risk” of advancing autonomous technology. It was followed by Prof. Dr. Frieder Stolzenburg, from the Harz University of Applied Sciences, with an insight into the problem of discrimination by AIs. The representatives of the University of Kassel then took a critical look at facial recognition software, before Max Haarich (Republic of Uzupis Munich) shared his views on the AI revolution with us.

Afterwards Sophie Wennerscheid gave an exciting reading from her book “Sex Machina – the future of desire”.

As the first day’s “KI_NEMA” feature film, we showed “Hi, AI”, followed by a conversation with the director Isa Willinger.

Saturday

On the second day, the First LEGO League delighted young and old with exciting robot competitions, while Juliane Victor (Radio Corax) guided us through the program.

In the afternoon we got insights into the opportunities and challenges of AI in medicine from Bettina Finzel (Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg). In the course of “FutureBrain”, the writing competition of the Science Year 2019 – Artificial Intelligence, organized by LizzyNet, the online magazine for girls and young women, over 200 young authors wrote their views on the world of tomorrow. Two of them gave us some impressions of their texts and presented their picture of AI in the future.

In addition to a variety of interactive offers in the culture workshop and the “Stübchen”, the KI_NEMA went into the second round with the surprise film “Ex Machina”.

Sunday

The last day started in the morning with the family film “Wall-E”. In the meantime we were able to listen to a lecture by Prof. Toby Walsh from the University of New South Wales Sydney, who dealt with the question of what the world might look like in the year 2062.

In the afternoon we showed the second surprise film, “her”, and thus also the last one from KI_NEMAS. With “Alexa, Can I talk to you” followed a play in the form of a dialogue between Pauline Menendez (Burg Giebichenstein Art College Halle) and the language assistant Alexa. The final of the three-day convention was the poetry slam “bot or not”, in which artificial intelligence and real creativity competed against each other.