Artificial Intelligence 101 [S4E14]

Tech Policy Grind

In this episode, Foundry Fellow Dyllan Brown-Bramble chats with Micaela Mantegna, Bikalpa Neupane, and Adil Islam. Dyllan and the panelists cover the basic who, what, when, where and why of artificial intelligence.

The conversation panel discussed what AI is, its future, and their thoughts on the pros and cons of AI technology.

This event is the first in a series of AI-related events leading up to our Fourth Annual Policy Hackathon. The Hackathon will be held this September 22-24th. Check out the latest information about the Hackathon on our website at or on our social media.

The experts that joined the episode:

• Micaela Mantegna – Micaela is an activist and scholar, known for her extensive work and public advocacy on AI and XR ethics, video games, generative AI, creativity and copyright. Currently, she is a TED Fellow and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. She is also a member of the Chatham House AITask Force. She was part of the external red team that contributed to evaluate OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 Preview in 2022. In addition, she collaborated with the Argentinian government in drafting the AI ethics and regulation chapter of Argentina’s National AI Plan in 2019. After 6 years of research, she published her first book “ARTficial: creativity, artificial intelligence and copyright” in 2022.

• Dr. Bikalpa Neupane – Bikalpa is the Head of AI and NLP at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, one of the largest R&D driven pharmaceuticals in the world. In his role, he manages distributed teams in US and Europe, and provides ‘AI-ML-NLP’ and ‘Experimentation as a service’ to several business units. He is from Nepal and he received his PhD degree in Informatics with focus on AI and ML discrimination from Penn State University. He teaches at several universities in areas of advanced data analytics, natural language processing and data mining.

• Adil Islam – Adil is the Chief of Staff at Stability.ai, one of the leading companies behind the generative AI revolution. He also works on girls’ education in Pakistan, deploying AI applications for students at Karachi’s largest public girls’ school. In the past, Adil led the product and business organization at Petuum, an MLOps startup.