Three Principles on Which AI Development Should Be Based

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation will be central to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and will help solving humanity’s grand challenges”, say the organizers of the AI for Good Global Summit , which took place on7-9 June 2017. The summit was organized by the ITU and the XPRIZE Foundation.

In the above video interview, made at the summit, Dignum makes a plea for regulation that will require designers to take values like privacy into account while designing AI systems. An article on the website of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) that reports on the conference also extensively mentions the contribution of Virginia Dignum, executive director of the Delft Design for Values Institute. We quote from this article, written by Bennie Mols:

Virginia Dignum, executive director of the Delft Design for Values Institute at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, formulated three principles on which AI development should be based: accountability, responsibility, and transparency (ART for short). She explained,

“According to the first of the ART principles, systems should be accountable. Why do they decide to take this or that step? Why they have used this type of data and for what?

“Second, people hold responsibility for systems. How are we managing and governing the data? Who has access to the data? Who doesn’t have access to the data? We should create principles around the responsibility for good, sound and valuable stewardship of data and algorithms.

“The third and final of the ART principles holds that systems should be transparent. People should be able to inspect the outcomes and verify the functioning of the algorithms.”

A lively panel discussion touched on a multitude of other challenges, such as building privacy by design, the blurring of sensitive and non-sensitive data, and the challenge to have informed consent on the use of personal data when there is so much passive surveillance by cameras and online trackers. Dignum stressed the need to have “the human in the loop of AI systems.”

The video below, made by the conference organizers, presents some highlights of day one of this conference.