Current Activities

The EU AI Act represents a crucial milestone in regulating the development, deployment, and utilization of artificial intelligence (AI). Likewise, discussions on AI ethics have delved deeper into the specific ethical challenges posed by AI systems. These parallel advancements underscore the imperative for conducting impact assessments to scrutinize the ethicality of existent and upcoming AI solutions. The proposed whitepaper aims to support organizations with an exposure to the European Union that undertake efforts to evaluate the impact of high-risk AI solutions from an ethical lens. The aspiration of the Whitepaper is to create a state of the art for ethical impact assessments of AI systems.

To this end, the whitepaper “Towards an Ethical Impact Assessment for AI“ will elaborate on the

a) implications of existing ethical and legal frameworks for the conduct of impact assessments for AI,

b) develop a scheme and methodology for determining the ethical impact of AI systems and

c) elaborate on the process and documentation required when performing an ethical impact assessment for AI solutions.

Why AI4People? AI4People stands for a European approach on the governance and ethics of AI. It is therefore composed of European experts in the fields of AI ethics as well as representatives of international companies involved in the development, deployment and use of AI. A key mission of AI4People to create an ethical impact assessment driven by values of the European Union.

For more information or collaboration proposals please contact: info@ai4people.org

Methodology
The entities involved in creating the whitepaper are the working group organized into different work streams and the scientific committee, which challenges and reviews the work conducted by the working group. The working group drives the conceptualization and realization of the white paper delivering its final proposal to the scientific committee. The scientific committee guarantees for the validity of the final white paper.

Working group
The working group consists of experts in the fields of AI ethics from different perspectives (academia, auditing & industry). The members are Raja Chatila (Sorbonne Université), Hiroya Inakoshi (Fujitsu Limited), Virginia Ghiara (Fujitsu Limited), Katie Evans (ex IEEE and UNESCO), Bianca de Teffé (Deloitte),  Sergei Bobrovskyi (Airbus) and Alexander Kriebitz (Technical University of Munich). The members of the working group elaborate on different working streams:

  • Work stream 1 [WS 1]: The main task of WS 1 is to identify the ethical and legal requirements for ethical impact assessments of AI based on the state of the art in European AI regulation and the European AI ethics discourse.
  • Work stream 2 [WS 2]: The main task of this working stream is to design an overall scheme of a tentative AI ethics impact assessment, as well as to develop the criteria and structure of the assessment.
  • Work stream 3 [WS 3]: This work stream focuses on the process of the ethical impact assessment based on the existing state of the art in AI auditing. It clarifies would kind of data input is needed to inform an ethical impact assessment, but also the level of scrutiny when reviewing an AI system.

Schedule
The publication of the whitepaper is scheduled for March 2024 coinciding with major legal developments in the European Union and will be presented to the European Parliament and the European Commission during the AI4People Summit “Towards a Good AI Society”.

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