The AIT Machine Learning Lab: Understanding Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence will profoundly change our social and economic life in the next decade. The AIT Machine Learning Lab deals with some of these changes. In particular, it focuses on the development and application of machine learning and algorithmic decision making - often referred to as "artificial intelligence" in the public debate. The Lab is part of the European Co-Change project coordinated by AIT Senior Scientist Dr. Peter Biegelbauer. The special feature of the AIT Machine Learning Lab is that experts of technical development and application work together with interdisciplinary experts who deal with ethics or law to consider how optimal framework conditions could look like in the future.

Artificial intelligence opens up opportunities, but also confronts us with challenges. The analysis of documents through speech recognition, of camera data through facial recognition software, of smartphone data through mobility analytics, among other examples, is dependent on the use of data-driven methods. To create algorithms that work, these methods rely heavily on the use of personal data. However, the use of this data raises questions of data protection, privacy as well as ethics - and whether democracy can be a sustainable form of government in a society permeated by these technologies.

The AIT Machine Learning Lab focuses on these challenges by seeking to better understand the research practices involved in the development of artificial intelligence technologies. This includes, for example, the framework conditions under which these practices take place, such as what the calls for proposals from research funding organisations look like.

The Lab aims to learn more about the challenges -in data protection, privacy and ethics, raise awareness and help reflect on research-related practices. This will happen mainly through discussions in workshops and conferences as well as in concrete research projects.

"The first steps of the Lab are therefore to learn more about research and innovation practices and to engage in a dialogue about how these practices can deal with the challenges mentioned above", Peter Biegelbauer explains.

Furthermore, there is a dialogue on artificial intelligence with officials of selected Austrian federal ministries, which will be deepened in the coming months. "For this purpose, we are planning international workshops on the topics of digitalisation, artificial intelligence, ethical and data protection issues in the application of these new technologies in the public sector," the project manager points out.

More about the Co-Change project