Featured
Ricardo Baeza-Yates has received the National Prize for Applied and Technological Sciences from his home country of Chile for a nearly four-decade career in computer science.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates doesn’t like the term “ethical AI.”
“Ethics doesn’t exist in machines,” he says.
The director of research at Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI, Baeza-Yates prefers “responsible AI.” This places “the burden on the people creating the technology,” as opposed to the user, he says.
Nuanced thinking like this — together with a nearly four-decade career in computer science — has now led to Baeza-Yates receiving the 2024 Chilean National Prize for Applied and Technological Sciences.
Baeza-Yates’ career has been marked, he says with a laugh, by being “in the wrong place and too early.” In 1992, he won a best software award for what “was basically a search software for Windows,” well before Google became a household name.
In 1999, Baeza-Yates published a textbook on search technology that is “the most used book on information retrieval, the most cited.”
“Regarding Chile,” he says, he has mentored “a lot of people doing Ph.D.s in Chile — and outside Chile.”
“For example,” he continues, “the top current computer science researcher in Chile was my first Ph.D. student.”
Baeza-Yates also received “the first large grant in computer science that was given in the country,” he says, to establish the Center for Web Research.
Now, with the Institute for Experiential AI, he says that he is “very interested in AI policy. I’m an expert on the Global Partnership on AI, I belong to the ACM and IEEE technology policy committees,” and he serves as an expert for the World Economic Forum.
“I try to be in the places where people discuss the policy for AI.”
Baeza-Yates joined the institute because he had previously worked with executive director Usama Fayyad at Yahoo. “I knew him well,” Baeza-Yates recalls. “I know how smart he is, and also I know how good he is as a researcher.”
Baeza-Yates recalls that returning to academia after spending time in industry was appealing, but it wasn’t a total about-face. At the institute his work would be “more applied, so between academia and industry.” The institute consults and partners with many external businesses and organizations.
“I like to be in this position where you’re in both industry and academia. I think that’s something that I like.”
The National Prize for Applied and Technological Sciences is only granted once every two years, bestowed on the recipient by the president of Chile, currently Gabriel Boric — Baeza-Yates is the first computer scientist to win the award.
“This is not my first nomination,” he says, but “I have been 20 years away from Chile,” which has perhaps contributed to the delay in receiving the award, Baeza-Yates speculates.
The recent upswell in artificial intelligence research — and its prominence in the public eye, he says — is another plausible reason why the award went to him this year.
Of course, there remain hurdles in AI development and policy that Baeza-Yates and his team at the Institute for Experiential AI are tackling.
Policymaking and regulation, he says, are “not going well. I think that the current regulation is not the best possible — and I hope we fix it — but we need some regulation, because otherwise a lot of bad things might happen.”
But Baeza-Yates is up for the challenge. “I like challenges, I think I like uncertainty, too,” he continues. “I don’t mind that.”
“I never make plans, that’s why I’m here,” he says with another laugh.