As a young child I was a ferocious reader. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t understand I’d ask my mother what it meant. Her response: “Look it up.” She nurtured my thirst for knowledge and my natural curiosity so that looking up words, people, and events, became a habit. I became obsessed with origin stories.

So nearly 15 years ago when I began working in automation and what was termed artificial intelligence I looked up where it began. That’s when I discovered that in 1956, ten, white, male mathematicians and computer enthusiasts gathered together at Dartmouth College in Hanover, Massachusetts to, as the summer proposal by the coordinators wrote, “find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans and improve themselves.” This two-month study was a seminal moment in the birth and imagining of artificial intelligence and remains the most influential gathering of AI scholars in the U.S. there ever was. But I wanted a do over.

The fact that the birth of AI was engineered by white men shouldn’t be a surprise. But the idea that AI can be reimagined, redesigned and recreated to be more equitable, diverse and pluralist is revolutionary. And it is not impossible. That is the vision of “ReImagining AI,” an AI summit unlike any other.

When Jamika and I began a conversation about hosting an AI Summit I immediately knew this was my opportunity for that do over. So I have taken more than a decade of experience, networking and knowledge and helped to curate what I believe will be the most inclusive, diverse, equitable and pragmatic gathering of AI practitioners ever.

This summit will offer attendees practical, applicable knowledge, strategy and skills to help them reimagine AI to be less exploitive, less harmful and more human centered, and above all, less AI can be redesigned and reimagined. And the intersection of human-centered design principles and machine learning process can push artificial intelligence beyond the narrow narrative of technologists to one more global, cultural and dare to be said, more noble in purpose.

Let’s remake AI in our image. Will you join us?