“Responsible AI” as focus theme 2023

By Markus Christen, UZH, Christoph Heitz, ZHAW and Karin Lange, La Mobilière

On December 15, eight members of the Data Ethics Expert Group met to look back to this year’s achievements and to determine the theme of 2023. The group decided to focus its activities on “Responsible AI”.

In the year 2022, the main activities of the Data Ethics Expert Group focused on three events, one internal event for discussing recent research projects on data and AI, one public event presenting the Digital Trust Label (see https://data-innovation.org/what-are-the-benefits-of-the-digital-trust-label/) and one public event organized together with Economiesuisse and the UZH Digital Society Initiative (see https://ethics.dsi.uzh.ch/news/ethics-and-the-data-economy/), where more than 30 industry representatives exchanged on practices to improve data ethics.

Furthermore, expert group member Christian Hauser reported on a funding success that emerged out of expert group activities: Innosuisse will fund the project “Entwicklung eines digitalen Dialogsystems für die heuristikbasierte Integration von ELSI in datenbezogene Entscheidungen bei Schweizer Unternehmen”. This project is partly based on the Data Ethics Code created by the Expert Group and published in 2020.

For 2023, the activities of the expert group will be centered around the topic of “responsible AI”. Due to the recent attempts of the European union to put forward AI regulation, many companies are starting to question the practical implications. Thus, the expert group aims to support the clarification process by focusing on the potential compliance challenges and related consultation needs companies may have. The expert group thus aims to organize a series of events and other activities (e.g., member survey) to first assess the compliance challenges associated with the current draft of the EU AI regulation and then to discuss the concrete needs that follow from those challenges. A detailed program will be worked out in Q1 2023 by the expert group leaders.