Global and South Korean AI experts and business leaders gathered in Seoul on January 30 for the founding ceremony of the "User Centric Artificial Intelligence (UCAI) Forum".

Keynote and distinguished speakers included Forum Co-chairs Professor Juergen Schmidhuber, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Harex InfoTech, Kyung Yang PARK, President Prof. Sangman HAN of Korea Academic Society of Business Administration (KASBA), Chairman Yosik KANG of the Seoul Digital Foundation, Professor Kyoung Jun LEE of Kyung Hee University, former Deputy Assistant to the US President Juan Zarate, Chairman Prof. Hyung Rim CHOI, Busan Digital Innovation Network, Secretary General Hojin PARK of Korea Franchise Association.  Congratulatory words were offered by former UN Secretary-General Chairman BAN, Ki-moon, and Her Excellency Ohood Khalfan Al Roumi, Minister of the State for Government Development and the Future in the United Arab Emirates.

UCAI enables hyper-personalized artificial intelligence (AI) services, which is tailored to the users’ specific needs, habits, and preferences.

Small business owners, young entrepreneurs, micro, small, and medium-sized companies, can all share (AI) platforms to increase customer contact and sales and enable global growth by doing platform business with their own brands and creating strategies just like large companies for almost no cost. UCAI is based on a revolutionary User Centric Platform which places the users, not businesses or big tech at the center of the network.

At the event, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered a congratulatory speech followed by a four-point vision declaration, which offered a vision to increase the value of all users, achieve balanced development, economic growth, while creating a happier world.

The new declaration also contains the goals of resolving the global digital gap and establishing a new User Centric Economic Order.

"UCAI helps achieve the user's goals while protecting the user’s information," said Kyung Yang PARK, CEO of Harex InfoTech.

"UCAI assists in resolving the problem of big tech firms’ data monopoly and the gap created by the development of the existing supplier and big-tech-oriented AI." He continued, "Just as cars, computers, and media have evolved from being primarily under the control of large companies to individuals, our vision is to give AI to users."

"In order to achieve this goal, AI, which protects user’s information by providing the learned insight rather than sharing the data and allowing the user to control their own data is the answer," he explained. "In order to realize UCAI, a federated learning technique is needed that allows the development of AI without forcibly collecting and integrating users’ data."

Park also revealed the need to develop User Central Centric Digital Me (UCDM) algorithms. These algorithms recommendhighly personalized actions to improve the user's situtation by measuring the user's condition from time to time after the user sets his or her own goal.

He went on to say, "UCAI will lead us to a better world where all human beings prosper together."

“The biggest weakness of the free-market economy is the monopoly problem,” he said. “The solutions so far are policy regulations such as anti-monopoly laws and online platform regulation.”

"The regulations cannot keep up with market changes, but rather create barriers to entry, strengthening the monopolies and hindering innovation," he continued. “Rather than regulation, free innovation and competition in the market are the better alternative.”

"UCAI allows small business owners, young entrepreneurs, and small and medium-sized enterprises to share the platform and do platform business under their own brands just like large companies without significant investment," he said. "Every business operator can do business based on the quality of their product and service competitiveness without a large amount of money.

"This will level the playing field and give everyone a more equal opportunity.Instead of a winner take all system, it will create a win-win economic system of shared prosperity," he predicted.

CEO Park also highlighted the need for a global scale growth fund to help quickly spread and grow the UCAI ecosystem around the world.

"Currently, a group of investment experts from the United Arab Emirates and the United States are creating a UCAI growth fund," he said. "The UCAI Growth Fund can help make companies’ business successful by providing hyper-personalized AI services using various AI technology companies leading AI technology and UCAI."

Professor Juergen Schmidhuber, co-chair of the forum, gave a keynote speech on the topic "AI For All".

Schmidhuber, who is often referred to as the Father of modern AI, published with his students Hochreiter & Gers & Graves the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and its training algorithms. This has become one of the most important models of deep learning. In 1990-91, he also pioneered generative adversarial networks (now widely used) for artificial curiosity as well as variants of Transformers (Transformers are the basis of the famous ChatGPT). Today, the most cited neural networks all build on work done in his labs.

Professor Schmidhuber said that AI is getting cheaper, and predicted that the time will come when everyone uses AI to improve their lives, just as everyone has a mobile phone now.

"In the universe, which was created 13.8 billion years ago, something important happened every quarter of its history," he predicted. "Around 2030, AI with human brain power will appear."

“In the next few decades, AI will permeate all human activities and enter the superhuman stage," he added. “The AI ecosystem will expand into space, and in the next 50 billion years, the entire visible universe will be colonized and transformed by AI.” Every 5 years, AI is getting 10 times cheaper. So the future is bright! Also, AI won’t be controlled by a few big companies.No, everybody will own cheap but powerful and User Centric AIs improving their lives in many ways.”  

Professor KyoungJun LEE of Kyung Hee University (Director of the Big Data Research Center), Director of the Forum Research Institute, gave a presentation on "UCAI Technology, Business Model and Ecosystem."

He is the only Korean to win the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) award three times (1995, 1997, 2020).

In June of last year, Professor LEE drew attention by applying personal receipts based on the ChatGPT methodology and the transformer model to natural language data.

He is advocating "AI sharing" that shares AI through federated learning, an AI technology owned by individuals without giving data to the platform.

Professor Lee also developed a commerce engine that analyzes and provides hyper-personalized recommendation services without exposing or sharing customer purchase data between businesses and applied it to small business AI recommendation services. He sees opportunity for use among franchises.

"Data sharing is difficult for various reasons such as invasion of privacy," he said. "So, instead we have to share learned insights from AI".

"I started researching User Centric in 2006," he continued. "At that time, before the iPhone came out, I wrote two papers at the time proposing that a merchant with a computer and network should give information to an individual rather than follow the current business centric system."

"Human Centric AI from Stanford University and Human Compatible AI from UC Berkeley are too ambiguous," he added."That's why we use the term User Centric."

Comparing Kakao Taxi and Uber, he pointed out that "Uber is user-oriented, while Kakao Taxi is supplier-oriented."

“Sharing AI is a new kind of collaboration. You can collaborate without sharing personal data,” he said. “Nature published a paper that showed that AI sharing improved performance by 30%.”

[Inaugural Seminar] CEO Juan Zarate “AML/CFT by Federated Machine Learning as a UCAI Methodology"

 

It is likely that User Centric AI is the future due to its ability to protect privacy while providing shared services like mobile payments, remittances, cash and ATM withdrawals. Other services like User Centric AI will allow for the hyper-personalized recommendations that are tailored just to you. User Centric AI is also likely to gain more attention due to the current popularization of Chat GPT.