Meet Professor Michael Rovatsos

Leadership Circle Spotlight

In the Leadership Circle Spotlight series, we are finding out more about the Scottish AI Alliance Leadership Circle. Below you can find an interview with Professor Michael Rovatsos and learn about his involvement with AI and Scotland’s AI Strategy.

Why did you want to get involved with Scotland's AI Strategy?  

I want Scotland to be at the forefront of the AI revolution, and to help shape how its use can benefit our citizens and economy. Working with a broad community across academia, industry, government, and civil society, I believe we can make a real difference if we develop a national AI strategy by working closely together across traditional boundaries – and articulating an ambition and ethos that set us apart from the approaches pursued elsewhere.

What does Trustworthy, Ethical, and Inclusive AI look like to you?  

It is fairly easy to describe it in terms of the outcome we want to achieve: we want AI to be safe, useful, and accessible to everybody. It is much harder to say how we get there – this will require a complex interplay between law and regulation, better practices in industry and government, and in some cases pretty deep research to understand and prevent risks while maximising benefits to everybody. The challenge is that the AI landscape is moving fast, and we often have to deal with its impacts after the fact. We need to do a lot of work to “mature” in our capabilities to address all the questions AI raises, so we can one day (hopefully soon) deal with it with the same confidence as we do with other technologies.

How is Scotland in a unique position with regard to AI? 

We benefit from exceptionally good relationships between government, industry, and academia, and are both small enough to be agile, flexible, and well-coordinated while also having tremendous expertise in AI across academia and industry. We punch way above our weight in terms of world-class research, education, and innovation – and it is particularly rare to find countries like that which also have the kind of ethos and approach to social responsibility, inclusion, and sustainable development that Scotland has.

What advice do you have for young people looking to get into the AI field? 

It’s easy to get carried away by hypes and successes in pockets of technology innovation that you read about in the media – the reality is that it’s a really broad field, and there is a reason we have still not answered many big questions around AI; quite likely, many smart people have looked into them before and struggled! I would suggest to “get your hands dirty” by trying to learn some basic techniques, using online courses and materials that are out there, many of which are very good. But once you’ve done that, look beyond the technology of the day. Try to understand the problems “behind” the code conceptually, and think about how their solution would actually provide real value if it works. And if a solution does not require AI, don’t force it – there are many other things out there that are useful!

Do you have a favourite newspaper or blog where you get your tech news? 

Not really, I’m afraid I mostly follow interesting things I see people mention on Twitter, as I don’t have the time to read any specific outlet consistently. As an academic, I do subscribe to the AI Magazine and the Communications of the ACM – even if you are not a researcher, I find they give a great overview of what’s currently happening in terms of research across those fields.

Who (or what) is your favourite fictional AI character from a book or movie? 

I don’t think I really have a favourite one, but I am currently reading “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I really like how it talks about a robot that struggles to understand the world, despite her human-like intelligence. In my view, ultimately a lot of AI in fiction is not really about the technology, it’s more about what it’s like to be human – once we think about how a machine, something that is alien to us, and likely much more limited in its capabilities, deals with the world, that gives us a bit of distance to think about all the kinds of things we otherwise consider “normal” in life. Which most of them are not, if you think about it.

What do you envision to be the biggest challenges for Scotland's AI Strategy going forward?  

In my view one of our biggest challenges is to convince the rest of the world how great we are – we are not the kind of nation that focuses on self-promotion, but AI is an extremely competitive field, and unless we manage to attract a lot of investment into Scotland to achieve our ambitions, there is a risk we will fall behind our larger competitors. But if we manage to position ourselves as the best place in the world to do ethical and inclusive AI, we stand a good chance of benefitting massively from AI.

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