EICC Live : How Statistics Fuels AI’s Real-World Impact

EICC Live: Code, Calculate, Change: How Statistics Fuels AI's Real-World Impact

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming how we live, work, and make decisions every day – from the content we see on social media to how we’re hired, navigate to work, or how spam is filtered from our inboxes. But what exactly is AI? How does it work, where did it come from, and where is it taking us?

Chaired by Sophie Carr, Vice President for Statistical Literacy and Education at the Royal Statistical Society, this thought-provoking session brings together expert voices to demystify the technologies behind the headlines.

What to expect:

A hitchhiker's guide to the history of AI: A non-technical journey through the highs and lows of AI’s impact on the world today. (William Browne, co-Founder, Emrys Health)

From Inputs to Impact: Why Understanding AI Shapes Fair Hiring: HR and recruitment teams increasingly rely on AI, yet with many CVs never being seen by humans it is important to understand how the data in CVs influences the outcomes. What questions do everyone involved in the hiring process need to ask so they can interpret AI outcomes critically to ensure a fair and balanced set of hiring decision? (Parwez Diloo, Data Scientist, Bays Consulting)

Graphical modelling for decision-making in criminal cases: Criminal cases can be incredibly complex, featuring multiple possible explanations of what might have happened and often conflicting pieces of interrelated evidence and testimony that need to be interwoven into these explanations. Disentangling the explanations and evidence to come to a coherent and rational decision is challenging even for those experienced in probabilistic reasoning, and yet we expect judges and juries to do this analysis essentially in real-time. Miscarriages of justice, like the Sally Clark case in which a woman was convicted of murdering her two children based on misinterpreted statistical evidence, are a stark warning of what can go wrong when there are failures in reasoning. In this talk I will present some new approaches for improving probabilistic reasoning in criminal trials and describe how they might have been used in previous cases. (Dr Amy Wilson, Lecturer, University of Edinburgh)

The speakers will offer fresh insights on how far we can trust AI to make decisions that impact our lives and shed light on the mysterious ‘black boxes’ influencing our daily decisions. The session will explore how AI and statistics are transforming the world around us—and why understanding them matters more than ever.

Whether you're curious, cautious, or captivated by AI, this event will leave you better informed—and hopefully inspired—about the role of statistics and AI in our future.