Fireside chat with Prof. Lynda Hardman

Principal Researcher & Strategist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, https://www.cwi.nl), the Dutch national research centre for Mathematics and Computer Science.

Full professor, part-time, of Multimedia Discourse Interaction at Utrecht University.

Member of European COST Scientific Committee, 2021-present

Member of Dutch national SURF Scientific Technical Council (WTR), 2021-present

Member of the Digital Humanism Initiative Steering Committee, 2020-present

Director of Amsterdam Data Science (http://amsterdamdatascience.nl), a partner organization whose mission is to strengthen the Data Science and AI ecosystem that spans academia, industry and society in the Amsterdam region 2018-2023.

European director of LIAMA (http://liama.ia.ac.cn), a research collaboration since 1997 between Inria (France), CWI and the Chinese Academy of Sciences 2018-2022.

Research specialisms: human information interaction, information visualisation, semantic web, topic-based literature exploration

Artificial Intelligence along the New Silk Road: Competition or Collaboration?

This chapter gives an impression of the development of the relatively young AI and computer science fields in Europe and China and how the current situation has developed over the past 20 years, where European and Chinese researchers are equal colleagues on an international stage and where diplomatic relations between the USA and China on the international stage have consequences felt directly by European AI researchers in their labs.

In what ways are AI researchers in China and Europe competitors with each other, for example in terms of the global shortage of trained AI researchers and practitioners? At the same time, the AI research community collaborates globally, so how can we ensure that the field continues to benefit from open international collaboration?