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Abstract: I will survey the initiatives undertaken at the European level since 2018 in order to foster the field of Artificial Intelligence, in particular supporting AI research and innovation through current projects, future calls and initiatives. I will illustrate the European AI Act, a proposed regulation for the deployment of AI systems and its criticism by CLAIRE. Finally I will discuss the controversy about the goal of explainable AI.

Short bio: Giuseppe Attardi is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. In the 1970s he worked at MIT's AI Lab, then at Sony Paris Research Laboratory, at ICSI in Berkeley and at Yahoo Research Barcelona. He developed Omega, a description logic for reasoning on ontologies; CMM, the memory manager used in the Java language; DeSR, a Deep Learning parser for natural languages; WikiExtractor, a popular tool used in training language models. He participated in the development of Arianna, the first Italian search engine. He is the founder or partner of a few startups, in Italy and in Spain. He was involved in the development of the fiber optic networks of the University of Pisa and of the national research network GARR. In 1996 he helped the Ministry of Communications to promote the diffusion of Internet in Italy. He led the development of the GARR cloud platform. He contributed to draft the Italian strategy on Artificial Intelligence and to the creation of the first national doctorate in Artificial Intelligence. He is the Italian representative in the CLAIRE-AI association. His current research focuses on natural language understanding, using Deep Learning techniques.