Renewing human relationships with augmented intelligence
A French business school has decided to open an augmented intelligence laboratory in Quebec, and a former French consul is to run it. Sound strange? It’s not as strange as it sounds. Here’s how it works.
French business school Sekma has launched its international augmented intelligence laboratory in Montreal in September 2019. Catherine Feuillet, former Consule de France in Montreal, has joined this technology lab as vice-president. This choice is in line with her desire to contribute to a better understanding of data science by tomorrow’s leaders and decision-makers.
An inveterate traveller
Catherine Feuillet became Vice-President of Sekma’s brand-new augmented intelligence laboratory in September 2019. In a career spanning almost 30 years, she has travelled the world in the service of French diplomacy. After Germany, South Korea, Malaysia and Portugal, she settled in Montreal in August 2015 to become Consule générale de France. But the technology sector has always been on her mind. In 2016, she helped launch Bleu Blanc Tech, a hub that brings together companies in the sector with close ties to France. According to Catherine Feuillet, this has fostered the development of a genuine socio-economic fabric in the Montreal region.
“Anything that is compartmentalized is less effective than anything that is shared. It’s augmented intelligence put at the service of a network.” – Catherine Feuillet
Augmented intelligence for tomorrow’s decision-makers
Augmented intelligence is a concept that places new technologies in an assistive role, as a means of amplifying human intelligence rather than replacing it, in order to improve products and services. This is the focus of the laboratory she joined, the fruit of a global strategy pursued by Skema for over 10 years. According to Catherine Feuillet, the school’s objective with this laboratory is to train tomorrow’s leaders in data science, so that they can better grasp the challenges and adapt their strategies in the best possible way. The lab is equipped with a computing platform that allows everyone to work, code and share in a different way than with standard IT tools. It will also have a bot whose role is to find academically validated information, accessible to Skema students and researchers.
Catherine Feuillet explains that the laboratory’s work consists in developing techniques and interfaces that enable collective human intelligence to be mobilized for analysis and strategy, rather than raw information processing.
An important part of Skema’s pedagogy and its laboratory is devoted to ethics, to enable students to use augmented intelligence while respecting the principles defined by the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI, to which Skema is a signatory (which notably advocates the protection and fulfillment of fundamental human capacities). “This is in line with the values to which I have committed myself during my diplomatic career. It’s a form of continuity to accompany international change on issues that affect us all,” says Catherine Feuillet. The laboratory has also signed an agreement with the Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’AI et du numérique (Obvia).
“My mission is to develop the laboratory on an institutional level. I have to promote it and make it easier to identify, especially in a highly competitive technological environment like Montreal. It’s a great challenge,” enthuses Catherine Feuillet. As a reminder, the Quebec metropolis aims to become a global center of excellence in artificial intelligence and new technologies.
A ubiquity that needs to be mastered
For Catherine Feuillet, AI-related developments offer opportunities to improve human relations. “New technologies enable a kind of ubiquity that needs to be controlled and supervised”, she warns. She also highlights the risk of certain people being left behind if they are unable to integrate certain technologies, a subject that must mobilize educational, institutional and associative structures.
“Catherine Feuillet insists: “This digital transition, which our society is undergoing, must enable us to get closer to people. In her view, we need to create new modes of interaction in which the human factor will be at the heart. “I’m convinced that we’ll have a better approach to technology once we take all its pitfalls into account”.
In Catherine Feuillet’s view, digital technologies can contribute to the international public good, to tackle major challenges such as the environment. “We can do it because we have the means. If we have the will to implement them, we’ll see concrete results”.
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