President Kaljulaid is due to open the international North Star AI applied machine learning and data conference on 7 March in Tallinn, which will specifically focus on data skills and AI adoption in organisations and startups with limited resources, organisers said on Monday.

"It is important to shift the focus from algorithms to data, as the way you use data, and how you use it, will define the success of your projects," said co-founder of non-profit North Star AI André Karpištšenko.

"Developers and data-driven leaders participating at North Star AI will understand how to solve the hardest problems which exist when organising and analysing massive noisy data sets," Mr Karpištšenko, who is also data science lead at Taxify, said in a North Star AI press release.

The competitiveness and the future of European tech is not decided solely by the determination and execution of entrepreneurs and technologists. Regulators and government support play a key role here, say conference organisers.

"The Estonian digital infrastructure offers unique opportunities to put AI to good use, but only if we can create a reasonable legal framework,'' said Ms Kaljulaid.

''Governments need to cease forgoing their main obligations as soon as new technological developments make this uncomfortable for them. This is the lesson we have learned, and applies to digital; will apply to AI and any future developments," she continued.

Worldwide meeting hub

The conference is scheduled to be followed by a roundtable discussion, where global AI experts will meet the CTO of Estonia (Kristo Vaher of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications) and local startup leaders. The meeting is set to cover a broad range of emerging tech topics, from AI implementation in Estonia and Europe, to international cooperation between countries, all of which will help ensure Estonia's leadership in e-governance.

The conference will constitute a meeting place for AI practitioners, technology leaders and data enthusiasts worldwide. The overall theme of the conference is data and the current challenges it brings, including data privacy, quality, high costs in labelling, to name a few, it is reported.

International speakers will bring case studies and examples from Silicon Valley in the US, the UK and Scandinavia, concerning data as a competitive advantage for governments and businesses.

The list of participating AI experts includes Samuel Ritter, research scientist at Google's DeepMind; Ville Tuulos, architect for machine learning at Netflix; Frank Seide, senior researcher and research manager at Microsoft; Henrik Lindstrom, product lead at Spotify; Roberto de Almeida, software engineer at Lyft; Pawel Mandera, NLP expert at Lingvist; Julien Simon, principal technical evangelist at Amazon Web Services; Alex Kozlov, enterprise solutions architect at Nvidia; André Karpištšenko, data science lead at Taxify; Kristjan Korjus, head of data at Starship; and Taivo Pungas, machine learning and automation lead at Veriff. 

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