Combining their forces, the Ministry of Digital Governance, and especially the General Secretariat of Telecommunications and Posts and the Ministry of Health organized a conference earlier today on artificial intelligence, the limits and opportunities it offers and, above all, the applications it can have in autism , whether it concerns early diagnosis or facilitating the individual.

Opening the work of the day, which aimed to raise awareness and inform the public and was held under the auspices of the Holy Archdiocese of Athens, the Secretary General of Telecommunications and Posts Athanasios Staveris noted that “we unite technology with a very basic part of our society, health and today we touch on the special topic of autism».

Both the person and his relatives “they climb a Golgotha ​​everyday. They also have psychological effects, economic effects and we even reach the point where there are phenomena of social exclusion” said Mr. Staveris, adding with reference to artificial intelligence that “today we have the opportunity to do something unique. This window of opportunity, this door opened this summer with Act 4961» of the Ministry of Digital Governance.

According to the general secretary, the specific legislation “It paves the way for us to now use new technologies in issues that are sensitive, such as autism. There are technological weapons that will remove financial, social pain from parents of children with autism, will give weapons to scientists, doctors to deal with autism more effectively, at the end of the day will enable children and adults to be able to join a society which is modern».

Welcoming the proceedings of the conference, the Minister of Digital Governance Kyriakos Pierrakakis referred to the two keynote speakers and after thanking and congratulating Archimandrite Mr. Kavaliotis “for his care and interest” in autism, he noted that Konstantinos Daskalakis “he has established and proved with his enormous academic and research contribution but also with his social concern” his interest in Greece and social issues such as autism.

As Mr. Pierrakakis said, speaking about artificial intelligence, “we are essentially talking about the future which has now come to the present, we are not simply talking about the future. Thanasis Staveris mentioned a relevant legislative initiative that we took last summer without necessarily being the “Lydian stone” or as the Anglo-Saxons say the “silver bullet” of the approach that a state should have in general for the Artificial Intelligence. There we move based on the European directions, quite simply we have a seat at the table but for the first time we are exercising the relative rights of this position, i.e. we have an opinion at the table on how the European regulations are shaped at a technological level».

However, the minister pointed out that at the moment “the central regulation that we are waiting for – because all this is a building – is the regulation on artificial intelligence” adding that in these kinds of issues “Greece and Europe are promoting the values of Technology”. “Technology is neutral,” emphasized Mr. Pierrakakis, explaining that “it depends on how you project your values ​​on it and how you use it. You do it with the logic of an earlier great Greek from Constantine, Michael Dertouzou at MIT, which is that you put a human-centered approach to computing or you do it in a different way.”

“We have chosen, essentially, to project our values ​​both as Greeks and as Europeans in the development of technology,” emphasized the Minister of Digital Governance, giving as an example the obligation of companies that use artificial intelligence algorithms for work matters to publish them.

“There is still much that needs to be done and will be done” said Mr. Pierrakakis. Regarding developments in the field of artificial intelligence, the minister emphasized that “a more interesting approach is to use these tools instead of them using you. To do, that is, a dimension of empowerment. And especially for Artificial Intelligence I think one can say that it can only be compared to nuclear fission: it is revolutionary and innovative. And we must use it in the best possible way».

Regarding autism and artificial intelligence, Mr. Pierrakakis commented that there has been “an additional awareness in recent years, we have many children who can now with early diagnosis see that they are on the autism spectrum and we have a series of interventions such as speech therapy / occupational therapies/ psychotherapies to make early intervention”. He added that “we know that in cases which are on the spectrum but are potentially highly functional, they are not deep on the spectrum, we can with timely and early intervention around two or three years have spectacular results”.

“This is where Technology comes in to help,” said the minister, noting some possible applications such as the use of “artificial intelligence” algorithms in MRI scans of children from a very young age, to systems that will also use advanced methods, or new robots that will come, or systems that videotape parents with children and can see the interaction between them.” As he emphasized, “technology can help both for detection and for education and for assistance. Our job more or less here is to do what we have sought to do in other simpler things that we are solving as backlogs of the past right now. Leverage technology and treat it largely as a public good that can come and solve very specific problems».

In closing, Mr. Pierrakakis emphasized regarding the term “excellence” that “it should not, especially for children who face challenges, be defined as a situation that raises walls because education is a process, not a state.

Our goal must be especially in the coming years when we move from the old way of thinking of education of a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, to a continuous enrichment of skills: the constant retraining, the constant retraining – especially in a life that lasts longer – and personalization.

THE Education therefore, it is a process, Education is a help, Education is to be able to bring out the best version of oneself”.

In the context of the conference, the baton was received by Konstantinos Daskalakis, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, member of the Informatics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and collaborator of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC), who spoke about the limitations and possibilities of artificial intelligence, focusing on “what we can expect from it and what we can’t”.

The distinguished professor used image recognition and language models as an example, while also referring to possible applications that this technology could have in the future.

However, as he said, “we have to be careful in using these technologies, because they are not a panacea” as, for example, “the predictions they make are not reliable.”

On the one hand, artificial intelligence “has made great progress, but on the other hand, it has issues, because the way current artificial intelligence models are trained is too focused on the existence of data,” emphasized Mr. Daskalakis.

Archimandrite Apostolos Kavaliotis, due to his expertise, as he holds a doctorate from EKPA, in the field of special pedagogy and psychology and teaches at the Department of Education, referred more extensively to autism as a disorder, noting that it is the most common neurological disorder, affecting 1 in 44 children, and the causes are varied as they can be genetic, environmental, epigenetic, metabolic, immunological and neurophysiological, while biological causes are gaining ground.

As the archimandrite said, autism is “a behavioral condition with mental effects, which brings about a trinity of impairments: “problem in communication, problem in understanding and problem in action” and for this reason the diagnosis can be made after the first two years of the child’s life, while the average age of diagnosis is from 3 to 6 years”. The diagnosis itself, especially the way it is done today, has “clear difficulties” that are not related to autism itself but to the child, such as “language deficits, complexity according to the age differentiation of symptoms” he said. As Mr. Kavaliotis underlined, the issue of diagnosis is very complex and especially in the Greek region there are long delays for the final diagnosis of children, a fact which has consequences for the subsequent development of the child. However, as he said, artificial intelligence could speed up and facilitate remote diagnosis, while over the course of a person’s life it could have many applications to improve their quality of life.

In addition, as part of the conference, a number of scientists were presented in the form of a dialogue, while brief greetings were sent by the Archbishop of Athens Hieronymos, the Minister of Health Athanasios Plevris, and the Deputy Minister of Health Mina Gaga.

Representing the Ministry of Health in the first dialogue panel on “from research to applicable policies – the role of the State”, the Deputy Minister for Mental Health and Addictions Zoi Rapti pointed out that “the effort we have been running for about 3 years at the Ministry of Health, creating the special portfolio for mental health, is to strengthen people and patients who have the need for support so that they themselves can support the issues related to the disease their”. “Mental health concerns us all as we understood during the pandemic. It’s about people with autism, and their families, it’s about their carers and obviously it’s about society as a whole. Because we need to give support to these people, the families and the teachers who are with them. Whenever the effort was made to strengthen our services with more resources”, the Deputy Minister emphasized. In fact, he indicated that when he asked for a digital map of the services available to the Ministry of Health, “we had to create it from scratch”. She noted that the structures for people with autism for their families were “minimal” and the Ministry’s initiatives are in the direction of creating day centers, boarding schools and short-stay hostels. As for the first step after diagnosis, Ms. Rapti said parents can go to “community mental health centers and psychiatric outpatient clinics and also day centers for adult support».

“We are much further ahead, with geometric leaps compared to previous years” said the Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, responsible for Welfare and Social Solidarity, Domna Michailidou in the context of the second dialogue panel, noting that “especially in the drawing up and implementation of the of public policy there was this dilemma of positive or theoretical sciences, this dilemma of the sensitive humanist or the rigid technocrat” while technology is a means which “is now used so that we see that it is not a dilemma but both together can be ». Disability is not a condition “on the theoretical spectrum, but disability is a human condition which with very specific technological tools we can facilitate our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens».

Bringing another example of technology that has changed the lives of people with disabilities, Mrs. Michailidou noted that “the digital disability card which had been voted for since 1996 has now been implemented».