Keynote: Albert Ali Salah

Title: AI and Animal Wellbeing Abstract: Rapid progress in computer based automation approaches creates new opportunities and challenges for animal wellbeing. On the one hand, innovative applications are being implemented to assist pet owners, people who work with animals, veterinarians, and for tasks that require monitoring of animals in different settings. On the other hand, we see challenges similar to those in automatic human behavior analysis, where automation may cause us to lose the human touch, and ethical issues and risks ensue from the potential usage of such applications, both in the short and in the long run. In this talk, I would like to draw parallels between computer based human and non-human animal behavior analysis, providing examples from our interdisciplinary work in equine and canine pain estimation, as well as other work at the newly established AI and Animal Wellbeing Laboratory at Utrecht University, to raise a number of issues and to discuss both technical and humanity challenges of the field.