Interview U. Chile to Ricardo Baeza-Yates: "Regulations must exist because there is a lack of ethics".

From Silicon Valley, where he is Research Director of the Experiential AI Institute of the Universidad del Noroeste, which has its main campus in Boston, in addition to being a Professor at the Casa de Bello, the computer scientist said that receiving this award "is very satisfying because as the saying goes: nobody is a prophet in his own land and sometimes I felt more recognized abroad than in Chile, so it is a joy to feel that in your country what you have done is appreciated".

To get this far, Baeza-Yates warns that "one of my maxims is not to make plans, so I never imagine the future, because I think plans limit your possibilities, and it's better to make the best of every moment and this way you're going to do much more than you could plan.

And although he is far away, he continues to follow what is happening in the country, especially the news that has shaken the academic world this week. In this line, the researcher indicated that "I do not like to speak when I do not have the data for certain, but regardless of the specific case, I believe that an important issue is the lack of specific rules in private universities, if they are truly non-profit entities. For example, when one sees exaggerated differences in salaries, even internally, because I know people who work in private universities that pay them very little for teaching, there is an issue of social justice that must be resolved, setting limits and in particular much more transparency. Regulations must exist because there is a lack of ethics, because if there were professional ethics, this would not happen: a person should say I do not accept this salary because it is unfair compared to people who are receiving another salary for the same, whether it is lower or higher, although this happens more frequently when your salary is lower".

- What does your work in the world of AI and Data Science consist of?

"Most of my scientific work, actually, is due to the earlier areas that I worked on mostly algorithms and information retrieval, everything that we have data. But it's true that about 16 years ago now, I worked on computational bias issues and about 6 years ago on responsible AI. I guess given the importance of AI nowadays, especially generative AI, the public policy and outreach work becomes more relevant, in addition to the scientific work I do."

- How do you remember your time as a student at the University of Chile?

D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, recalls that he entered engineering at the University of Chile because he was not sure whether he wanted to be an astronomer or an engineer and although his mother worked at the Catholic University, this allowed him to postpone the decision. Then he adds that "I had never seen a computer, it was the time when personal computers did not yet exist and when I took my first computer course, in which I did not use a computer either, because there were some sheets of paper called paper screens where you wrote the programs, then I fell in love with computational logic, with algorithms". But there was still no Civil Engineering in Computer Science and he wanted to be a Civil Engineer, so he chose Electrical Engineering, perhaps because it was the most difficult specialty, doing his bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the same time: "I did two careers and two master's degrees at the same time, both in computer science and electrical engineering".

Regarding the professors who inspired his career, the academic recalls that "one of my professors was Patricio Poblete, who was such a good professor that I fell in love with the subject of algorithms and with him I did my master's thesis and with that I decided to do a doctorate and go abroad, because at that time there was no PhD in Computer Science in Chile and I was lucky that when I presented my master's thesis at the International Congress of the Chilean Society of Science and Computer Science, in 1985, a professor from the University of Waterloo saw it and liked it very much and offered me a scholarship to study with him".

And along with his introverted personality, he managed to come up with a record 12 bunches in one semester, when the average is five. "I also did a lot of physics subjects thinking I could do astronomy as well, so I was taking a lot of courses at the same time."

Once he finished his doctorate and had offers abroad, Baeza-Yates decided to return to the country "because I wanted to contribute to Chile, there were very few PhDs in Computer Science at that time and one could make a difference and I believe that I did make a difference in research and training of human resources. For example, when we started the PhD in Computer Science, the first PhD student and the first one I had was Gonzalo Navarro, who is now the best researcher in Computer Science in Chile".

"Of course in Chile everything was more difficult, there was less funding, but I always had the support of projects either from Conicyt, Fundación Andes, Fondef, after the Millennium with the first Núcleo de Computación, the Centro de Investigación de la Web, so I can't complain, because despite having few resources, we managed to do many things, including a search engine for the Chilean web, TodoCL, which was very important for the next step for having done research with search engine data, which implied receiving the offer to do the Yahoo laboratory for Europe in Barcelona", he recalls.

- Is there a concern about breaking down the gender barrier in the computing world?

"On my part, yes. At the beginning it was chance, but then it was on purpose, because half of my 32 trained doctoral students are women, partly because I work on bias issues, and this is something unique because I don't know anyone of my colleagues, even women, who have obtained the same."

In this same line, to encourage girls and adolescents to enter the world of science, Baeza-Yates says that "intelligence exists in everyone, all people have a great potential that many times they do not develop, luckily I was motivated very young, my maternal grandfather taught me to read at the age of three, so I think that is an important part. My advice, more than to teenagers and children, would be to parents to try to motivate their children from the beginning to read more, not to give them a cell phone to waste their time, but to let them see interesting things on the Web and learn, to try to make people focus on positive things in the long term and not on instant satisfaction".

- In concrete terms of your work, how important is it to work on AI regulation?

"Now that Chile is thinking about legislating on the use of AI, it is important to understand how to do this well and, for example, maybe not copy what the European Union has done, which is not the best possible regulation for my taste, but it is important to regulate to not having any regulation as well, but I would like to see better regulation than what is currently being put forward."

- What are the mistakes that the EU has made that you would not like to make in the country?

"There are three major conceptual problems with EU regulation. The first is that I don't think the most convenient thing to do is to regulate the use of technology, the example I always give is that if someone would say 'you cannot hit a person with a hammer', then the next rule will be 'you cannot hit a person with a stone', and so on, and so on, and so we go on with all the technologies and tools and ways of hitting a person possible, that makes no sense, that's why we have human rights that are independent of technology. The right regulation would be not to hit people, period, it makes no difference how you do it and that is what is currently missing because if we are not going to have to regulate quantum computing, blockchain and anything new we do in the future, that is going to be a very difficult path because not only we do not agree in different countries, but it is going to have to be consistent over time and that is going to be more and more complicated. Regulation has to be by sector as we currently have it: we regulate transportation, health, insurance, pensions, etc. We have to regulate the problem and if possible, independent of technology, that is, that this should be useful forever".

"The second problem is that it is only for Artificial Intelligence, but any software can do harm and now it would be enough to say that Artificial Intelligence is not used to not have to obey this regulation and then we have a loophole. The third issue has to do with the fact that this regulation uses risk to classify applications and there are four levels of risk which are prohibited, high, limited and marginal. What is the problem? We do not know exactly how to measure these risks, in fact, the regulation uses examples to define these risk levels and we are inventing categories that do not exist because risk is a continuous measure. Where do we put the limit of high risk and limited risk, if we do not know exactly how to measure it? It's the same thing we already did to invent races, because skin color is another continuous measure, where you put that dark skin starts and light skin ends, it makes no sense, we are repeating historical mistakes".

- If you were given all the necessary economic and human resources, what would you like to create in terms of technology?

"There is an idea that I have always wanted to do, but it needs a lot of research and it would be to have like a digital 'Jiminy Cricket', which would be a digital assistant that would tell you all the things you can improve on, like your digital awareness, all the things you didn't do well during the day, all the things you could have done differently and also all the things that they tried to do to you that were not right and that maybe you didn't realize. A digital conscience that one could extend to institutions, that is, imagine that there is an integrated system in every company that would tell the general manager all the things that could be done better from a social point of view, not from the point of view of making more money or being more productive, but how you could do the same, but worrying more about the social impact that you have."