Artificial Intelligence offers great opportunities for elaborating innovative solutions to improve people’s life and their social environment. The integration of AI into society affects most areas of private and social lives, at the collective and individual levels. In response, individuals, groups and institutions implement regulatory processes to address the real or imagined risks resulting from AI. To avoid both disaster scenarios and the dangers of wilful blindness, social and computer scientists should join forces to implement research on the actual societal impact of AI. Moreover, reasoned regulation of AI requires not only an understanding of algorithms and technologies, but also the study of the social value and meaning that users attribute to them and the understanding of the society where they are deployed. Grenoble is particularly well prepared to meet this challenge. For several years, the Univ. Grenoble Alpes IDEX program has been promoting the development of humanities and social sciences, fostering interdisciplinary work in the digital field. Our objective within MIAI is to build on these foundations and change scale by implementing chairs dealing with the issues of: Integration of AI into society and regulation of AI by society.

The health and social protection systems in France and in Europe involve numerous actors: hospitals, social services, companies, universities and research and regulation centers. Data is collected from multiple sources, and while personalised patient information can revolutionize diagnosis and treatment, the real problem is capturing, storing, and understanding it. With AI, health becomes smart health, making true the promises of the P4 (Predictive, Personalized, Preemptive, Participative) vision of medicine. The CHU of Grenoble possesses both the data acquisition tools (a data lake that will be part of the French hub for AI in Health, clinical metabolomics platform) and the environment to develop and test AI-based devices (it hosts one of the 8 French Centers for Clinical Investigation and Technological Innovation). Furthermore, Grenoble is a major place of AI technologies for health, thanks to its interdisciplinary skills and its long-standing cooperation between physicians, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists and industrial actors. Our strategy within MIAI is to enlarge these perspectives through a continuous effort on data collection and the development of new AI-based tools for omics, improved health trajectories, improved computerized assistants and augmented patient empowerment. Some of these issues are adressed in the chairs below:

The 2018 World Economic Forum highlighted several challenges faced by Earth systems: climate change, biodiversity and conservation, healthy oceans, water security, weather and disaster resilience. Taken together, these issues raise an urgent global challenge and require developments of AI methodologies in an interdisciplinary framework. The environment chairs of MIAI contributes to addressing all these challenges. It deals notably with the monitoring of species interactions which are impacted by climate change, the mitigation of natural disasters, the prediction of natural hazards, the forecasting of the ocean circulation and the monitoring of large hydraulic structures. Moreover, decarbonising the energy is a key issue to preserve the environment, a problem we address through the development of new technologies for smart grids.

Even if industry is sensor/data intensive and decision-making is at the heart of major industrial processes, the application of artificial intelligence is still nascent in manufacturing. Yet, the potentials of AI in industry are widely recognized (up to 20% cost reduction). Grenoble has a long history of research and education on industrial engineering, materials and processes and participates to the EIT Manufacturing6 on these topics. The originality of the Grenoble approach lies in the consideration that human beings are still the major industrial actors, a paradigm sometimes referred to as Industry 4.H. The aim of the chairs of this topic is to integrate AI tools in manufacturing processes to enhance product and process quality, meet the high personalization of the customers’ demand and support the promising industrial strategies, such as servitization and circular economy. A collaboration agreement with Fraunhofer (IPA and IML) has been signed to this end.