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International Forum on AI and the Futures of Education: Developing Competencies for the AI Era Synthesis Report; 7-8 December 2020 Year of publication: 2021 Author: Fengchun Miao | Wayne Holmes Corporate author: UNESCO This synthesis report has been developed by the UNESCO Unit for Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Education within the Future of Learning and Innovation Team, drawing on the International Forum on AI and the Futures of Education held in Beijing and simultaneously online from 7 to 8 December 2020.The Forum underlined the importance of reviewing the very purpose of education, together with the opportunity for real transformation, and the role that AI might play. It is widely acknowledged that current educational practices and educational environment are very rigid, and that the future of education should be more flexible and responsive to changing circumstances and innovation. National education authorities should identify what skills young people need to enable them to live and thrive in the new realities of a constantly changing world, and what digital transformation makes possible in the national and international context. In short, new education models are needed to put students at the centre, to move away from a focus on memorizing content, to integrate the digital and the analogue, and to foster human cognitive, socioemotional and critical skills, all of which might – with foresight and careful attention – be enabled by AI and other digital technologies. 
AI and Education: Guidance for Policy-Makers Year of publication: 2021 Author: Fengchun Miao | Wayne Holmes | Ronghuai Huang | Hui Zhang Corporate author: UNESCO Artificial intelligence (AI) is envisioned as a new tool to accelerate the progress towards the achievement of SDG 4. Policies and strategies for using AI in education are central to maximizing AI’s benefits and mitigating its potential risks. Fostering AI-ready policy-makers is the starting point of the policy development process.This publication offers guidance to policy-makers in understanding AI and responding to the challenges and opportunities in education presented by AI. Specifically, it introduces the essentials of AI such as its definition, techniques, technologies, capacities and limitations. It also delineates the emerging practices and benefit-risk assessment on leveraging AI to enhance education and learning, and to ensure inclusion and equity, as well as the reciprocal role of education in preparing humans to live and work with AI.The publication summarizes three approaches to the policy responses from existing practices: independent approach, integrated approach and thematic approach. In a further step, it proposes more detailed recommendations and examples for planning AI and education policies, aligned with the recommendations made in the 2019 Beijing Consensus on AI and Education. 
Guidelines for ICT in education policies and masterplans Year of publication: 2022 Author: Fengchun Miao | Juan Enrique Hinostroza | Molly Lee | Shafika Isaacs | Dominic Orr | Fabio Senne | Ana-Laura Martinez | Ki-Sang Song | Alexander Uvarov | Wayne Holmes | and Benjamin Vergel de Dios Corporate author: UNESCO Countries across the world have been leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs) to advance education for decades. These initiatives are driven by public institutions and involve commercial technology companies, and have resulted in paradoxes such as increasing digital inequalities and uneven access to high-quality digital learning opportunities. The COVID-19 crisis further exacerbated this trend: At least one third of students globally did not have access to distance learning during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.The publication aims to guide policy-makers to ensure that when adopting technology, human rights should be defended; inclusion, equity and gender equality should be at the heart of solutions; and innovations should be considered as a common good. Based on these principles, the publication presents a human-centred view on the potentials of technologies ranging from low-bandwidth technologies to emerging technologies including Artificial Intelligence and Web 3.0 or “metaverse”. It advocates for national policies to protect the digital well-being of teachers and students, to reduce and neutralize the digital emission footprint, and to avoid ‘techno-solutionism’.This publication proposes policy planning frameworks and an iterative roadmap to examine the digital readiness of local education systems, assess needs of learners and teachers, and plan well-resourced national ICT in education programmes. This is followed by a deep dive into examples of national masterplans on the use of ICT in different types of education. 
International Forum on AI and Education: Steering AI To Empower Teachers and Transform Teaching, 5–6 December 2022; Analytical Report Year of publication: 2023 Author: Fengchun Miao | Kelly Shiohira | Zaahedah Vally | Wayne Holmes Corporate author: UNESCO | JET Education Services The International Forum on AI and Education has contributed ‘to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture’ (UNESCO, 1945). The Forum has now become the world’s leading event promoting knowledge-sharing, the understanding of peoples, and the achievement of international agreements, in the fast-developing and increasingly impactful field of AI and education. The fourth edition of the International Forum on Artificial Intelligence and Education aimed to foster knowledge sharing specifically on how to steer the design and use of AI to empower teachers and to transform teaching methodologies within the broad framework of digital transformation of education. The Forum sought to bring together a range of expertise and experiences across the globe, and, in keeping with UNESCO priorities, a special focus was placed on Africa. A total of 16 national strategies were presented at the Forum by the various national ministers and representatives invited to attend. The national strategies shared during the Forum also unveiled the varying levels of preparedness and policy responses toward AI across different regions, a reminder that the pre-existing digital divide still underpins the system-wide uptake and integration of AI in education. Therefore, not all of the strategies were directly related to or containing AI because some areas that were represented at the conference are still at the nascent stages of AI Strategy development. The presentations of national initiatives and strategies related to AI from these countries shed light on the general awareness of policy-makers on the impact of AI in education and the commitment of national governments to fostering AI competencies among students and teachers. This report focus on the following key themes: national strategies on AI and education; critical reviews of roles of AI in the digital transformation of education; ethical principles and their implementation with a specific focus on gender equality; AI competencies for teachers, and notable algorithms or AI platforms and AI-informed pedagogies. The report concludes with considerations for the future based on the authors’ own analysis of the key role of human teachers, steering the human-centered approach, mainstreaming gender equity, designing education-specific AI models and innovative pedagogy, and ensuring human agency in defining problems and designing solutions.a 
Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research Year of publication: 2023 Author: Fengchun Miao | Wayne Holmes Corporate author: UNESCO This Guidance aims to support the planning of appropriate regulations, policies and human capacity development programmes to ensure that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) becomes a tool that genuinely benefits and empowers teachers, learners and researchers. It explains the Al techniques used by GenAI and maps out a list of GPT models that are made publicly available, especially those under open-source licences. It also opens a discussion on the emergence of EdGPT - GenAI models that are trained with specific data to serve educational purposes. Furthermore, it summarizes some of the key controversies around GenAI, from worsening digital poverty to the homogenization of opinions, and from deeper deepfakes to issues of copyright. Based on a humanistic vision, the Guidance proposes key steps for the regulation of GenAI tools, including mandating the protection of data privacy and setting an age limit for independent conversations with GenAI platforms. To guide the proper use of the tools in education and research, this Guidance proposes a human-agent and age-appropriate approach to the ethical validation and pedagogical design processes. 
Challenging Systematic Prejudices: An Investigation into Bias Against Women and Girls in Large Language Models Year of publication: 2024 Author: Daniel Van Niekerk | Maria Peréz Ortiz | John Shaw-Taylor | Davor Orlic | Ivana Drobnjak | Jackie Kay | Noah Siegel | Katherine Evans | Nyalleng Moorosi | Tina Eliassi-Rad | Leone Maria Tanczer | Wayne Holmes | Marc Peter Deisenroth | Isabel Straw | Maria Fasli | Rachel Adams | Nuria Oliver | Dunja Mladenić | Urvashi Aneja | Madeleine Janicky Corporate author: UNESCO | International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) This study explores biases in three significant large language models (LLMs): OpenAI’s GPT-2 and ChatGPT, along with Meta’s Llama 2, highlighting their role in both advanced decision-making systems and as user-facing conversational agents. Across multiple studies, the brief reveals how biases emerge in the text generated by LLMs, through gendered word associations, positive or negative regard for gendered subjects, or diversity in text generated by gender and culture. The research uncovers persistent social biases within these state-of-the-art language models, despite ongoing efforts to mitigate such issues. The findings underscore the critical need for continuous research and policy intervention to address the biases that exacerbate as these technologies are integrated across diverse societal and cultural landscapes. The emphasis on GPT-2 and Llama 2 being open-source foundational models is particularly noteworthy, as their widespread adoption underlines the urgent need for scalable, objective methods to assess and correct biases, ensuring fairness in AI systems globally.