AUTOMATING SOCIETY -

Taking Stock of Automated Decision-Making in the EU

A report by AlgorithmWatch in cooperation with Bertelsmann Stiftung, supported by the Open Society Foundations

Kindly hosted by Liisa Jaakonsaari (S&D), Julia Reda (Greens/EFA) and Michał Boni (EPP)

Systems for automated decision-making or decision support (ADM) are on the rise in EU countries: Profiling job applicants based on their personal emails in Finland, allocating treatment for patients in the public health system in Italy, sorting the unemployed in Poland, automatically identifying children vulnerable to neglect in Denmark, detecting welfare fraud in the Netherlands, credit scoring systems in many EU countries – the range of applications has broadened to almost all aspects of daily life.

This begs a lot of questions: Do we need new laws? Do we need new oversight institutions? Who do we fund to develop answers to the challenges ahead? Where should we invest? How do we enable citizens – patients, employees, consumers – to deal with this?

PROGRAMME

• Welcoming remarks

Ralph Müller-Eiselt, Director, Bertelsmann Stiftung

• Presentation of the core findings of the report

Matthias Spielkamp, Executive Director, AlgorithmWatch

• Comments on the report by the hosting MEPs

Liisa Jaakonsaari, Julia Reda and Michał Boni

• Panel discussion about the report’s findings

- Ursula Pachl, Deputy Director General, BEUC, member of the EU High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence

- Minna Ruckenstein, Professor at the Consumer Society Research Centre and the Helsinki Center for Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki

- Prabhat Agarwal, Deputy Head of the E-Commerce and Online Platforms Unit, Directorate-General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission

- Matthias Spielkamp, Executive Director, AlgorithmWatch

Facilitator: Brigitte Alfter, journalist, research network coordinator for the report

Followed by Q&A with the audience

REGISTRATION

Learn more about the report and sign up for the launch event at https://algorithmwatch.org/en/automating-society/

IMPORTANT

Please note that external participants need to register until 22 January in order to access the European Parliament!