Pepperdine University will host the 6th annual Human-Centered AI Conference alongside the inaugural Global Summit on Faith in AI on September 25–26 in Malibu, bringing together AI practitioners, researchers, corporate executives and global religious leaders to examine the technology’s benefits and moral implications.
Human-Centered AI Conference
Pepperdine’s two-day event will feature keynote lectures, panel discussions and opportunities for community connection aimed at exploring how artificial intelligence can positively affect the human condition and how its development should be guided ethically. “Pepperdine’s Human-Centered AI Conference is an exciting opportunity to hear how some of the world’s leading AI experts are trying to harness these new tools to better humanity,” says Fabien Scalzo, an associate professor of computer science at Seaver College, director of Pepperdine’s Keck Data Science Institute, and chair of the conference.
Speakers from academia and industry scheduled to appear include Judea Pearl (University of California, Los Angeles), Paul Thompson (University of Southern California), Katie Bouman (California Institute of Technology) and CEOs such as Leo Petrossian (Kandu Inc.), Matthew Johnson and Josh Bloom (Valency). The program will also include recent Pepperdine alumni working in the AI field—Sean Wu, the University’s first Rhodes Scholar, Ulysse Saltiel, Katelin Goño and Yuning Yang—who will return to campus to discuss their professional experiences in AI. “We’re so excited to welcome our talented alumni back to campus,” said Scalzo. “They are the ones who will help shape the future of AI. Their wisdom, insight, and accomplishments all exemplify the impact Pepperdine students can go on to make in their vocational fields.”
Global Summit on Faith in AI
The inaugural Global Summit on Faith in AI will convene prominent religious figures to analyze AI from multiple faith perspectives. The summit is chaired by Johnnie Moore, Pepperdine’s vice chancellor and managing director of Middle East studies, and will include Rabbi Erez Sherman (Sinai Temple), Archbishop Thomas Paul Schirrmacher and His Eminence Metropolitan Gerasimos of San Francisco (representing His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew), among other faith leaders.
“You don’t have to be a religious Christian like me to appreciate religion as a kind of wisdom compounding across the centuries,” said Moore. “What we are witnessing now is something like a peace treaty between religion and science — because science has finally collided with the very questions that once belonged to the philosophy department, the questions of what a person is, what a mind is, and what we owe one another. Artificial intelligence forces those questions on all of us at once, and we’d be foolish to take them up without the people who’ve been thinking about them the whole time.”
Registration for the 6th annual Human-Centered AI Conference and the inaugural Global Summit on Faith in AI is now open. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear from leading experts and faith leaders and to engage in discussions about the ethical, moral and societal dimensions of AI.
