To explore the opportunities, challenges, and growing impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science worldwide, particularly in the global South, TWAS has launched a monthly Distinguished Speaker Webinar Series on AI and Data Science.
The third webinar will feature Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates.
The event will take place online via Zoom on 10 August 2026 at 3:00 pm CEST, in a 40-minute online lecture format, followed by a 20-minute Q&A session. Register here.
Abstract
In this talk, Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates will summarize how generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) works, its ethical and legal issues, and delve into the threats and challenges it presents to higher education and people's mental health. He will complement this discussion with the first initiatives to regulate it and initial solutions to these problems.
Who is Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is a search chief scientist at You.com in San Francisco, the United States of America, as well as a part-time full professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and the University of Chile in Santiago. Earlier in his career, he has been director of research at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University in Silicon Valley campus (2021–25) and vice-president of research at Yahoo Labs, based first in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California (2006–16).
He is a world expert in responsible AI and a member of AI technology committees at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence/Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is a co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd edition), which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award.
In 2009, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and, in 2011, an IEEE Fellow. He has won national scientific awards in Chile (2024) and Spain (2018), among other accolades and distinctions. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his areas of expertise are responsible AI, web search and data mining plus data science and algorithms in general.