The work of the High-Level Expert Group on AI has started

by Lucilla Sioli, Director for Digital Industry and Artificial Intelligence at DG Connect, European Commission

The first meeting of the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence took place last Wednesday. Discussions were productive and an excellent start to the work of the Expert Group! I enjoyed the exchanges within the Expert Group, both as part of the panel meeting and in the breakout sessions on AI ethics and on policy and strategy.

The meeting kicked off with presentations by the Commission services on the EU AI strategy and on the mandate of the group. Mr van den Hoven of the  Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) highlighted the main points from its “Statement on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and  'Autonomous' Systems", which, together with the inputs from the European AI Alliance, provided one of the starting points for discussions.

I found it very interesting to see this heterogeneous group of experts, with a variety of backgrounds, formulating the first suggestions  and gradually moving to more concrete ideas. One interesting discussion took place on how to formulate a usable definition of AI, and about how necessary a detailed definition really is. A number of experts decided to follow up on this.

In the break-out sessions the Expert Group on AI provisionally identified a number of core challenges in ethics, starting from the need to identify which are the core objectives (e.g. human dignity, fundamental rights, sustainable planet), the no-crossing lines (autonomous lethal weapons, cognitive AI), as well as principles including governance of ethics, generating trust, assigning responsibility; addressing bias; the implementation and practicality of the guidelines, the balance between regulation and innovation; and the delivery of ethical systems by design.

The experts also proposed a number of themes for discussions on policy and strategy to boost Europe's AI capacity and competitiveness. These included the characteristics of European AI and the most important regulatory challenges; skills gaps and opportunities for AI research and deployment; ensuring that excellent researchers and innovators in AI stay in Europe; novel European uses of AI, such as in the "green" agenda; potential creation of a European AI research organisation in the form of a "CERN for AI"; and encouraging the use of well-curated open public sector data.

I was pleased to see that Mr Pekka Ala-Pietilä was appointed Chair of the Expert Group. He planned for the group to draft and table minutes of their discussions in the next couple of weeks  and encouraged further elaboration of the proposed challenges and themes. These will be the basis of the workshops to be organised from September on.

Stay tuned for further exchanges.