BCAM highlights the potential of artificial intelligence at Innobasque's Global Innovation Day 2024

• BCAM and BAIC were two of the protagonists of the Global Innovation Day 2024, the event organised by Innobasque to promote innovation in the Basque Country.

Innobasque, the Basque Innovation Agency, together with BAIC (Basque Artificial Intelligence Center) and BCAM (Basque Center for Applied Mathematics), launched this year 2024 a call for the presentation of case studies of artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence solutions developed in the Basque Country. This initiative was part of the Global Innovation Day 2024, a key annual event for the Basque innovation ecosystem.

Thus, on 4 November, Azkuna Zentroa - Alhóndiga Bilbao hosted this day in which agents of the Basque innovation ecosystem, students and representatives from different social and business fields analysed the present and future of Artificial Intelligence in this annual meeting organised by Innobasque.

José Antonio Lozano, scientific director of BCAM and professor at the UPV/EHU, was interviewed to address the impact of generative artificial intelligence in today's society. Lozano described this technology as an ‘unlimited source of opportunities but not without risks’, highlighting the need for its development to be managed from more public perspectives. ‘It is worrying that this advance is mostly in the hands of large companies rather than in the hands of the state,’ he added.

On the other hand, BCAM researchers Verónica Álvarez and Onintze Zaballa brought mathematical innovation to groups of university and vocational training students, a total of 125 students from all over the Basque Country. The two BCAM researchers presented them with an advanced energy consumption prediction algorithm, which combines hundreds of continuously updated models with the latest information. This approach not only ensures that predictions are accurate and aligned with real data, but also allows the uncertainty in energy demand to be quantified, improving the reliability of the estimates.

With interventions such as this, BCAM reaffirms its commitment to the use of applied mathematics to address global challenges, from energy transformation to the ethical impact of artificial intelligence, and once again establishes itself as one of the key players in the scientific community of the Basque Country.