FAIR-AI – a new project with the AIT AI Ethics Lab in the lead

How can you create fair AI? The FAIR-AI consortium comprises 111 members from 22 organisations and will work for three years on this question. The project is led by our esteemed colleague Alexander Schindler who has been part of the AIT AI Ethics Lab since its inception within Co-Change. The Lab coordinator Peter Biegelbauer is responsible for the FAIR-AI work package on Ethics and Law.

FAIR-AI addresses the research gap created by dealing with society-related risks in the application of AI. In particular, it focuses on the requirements of the AI Act and the obstacles to its implementation in the day-to-day development and management of AI-based projects and its AI law-compliant application. These obstacles are multi-faceted and arise from technical reasons, technical and management challenges, and socio-technical application-related factors. 

In this context, we consider the detection, monitoring, and, when possible, anticipation of risks at all levels of system development and application as a key factor. FAIR-AI follows a methodology to disentangle these types of risks. Rather than demanding a general solution to this problem, our approach takes a bottom-up strategy by selecting typical pitfalls in a specific development and application context to create a collection of instructive, self-contained use cases, which are implemented in research modules, to illustrate the intrinsic risks. We go beyond the state of the art to explore ways of risk disentanglement, prediction, and their integration into a recommender system capable of providing active support and guidance.

The objectives of the work package on ethics and law (WP5) will be to support the project in designing desirable and trustworthy AI tools and systems by developing know-how, evaluating and adapting concepts and approaches, developing non-technical or technical solutions. These will be ethics tools, ethics-by-design processes, legal tools, and teaching modules based upon these.

Financing for FAIR-AI comes from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) via the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).