By AI Trends Staff
AI is receiving a push from the race to find a vaccine, diagnostics and effective treatments for the COVID-19 virus, and the push has also heightened awareness of the need to implement AI that is transparent and free of bias—AI that can be trusted.
The World Economic Forum is one organization that has responded. With ethics in mind, the organization’s AI and Machine Learning team recently announced its Procurement in a Box toolkit with concrete advice for purchasing, risk assessments, proposal drafting and evaluation.
To produce the toolkit, the Forum worked over the past year with many organizations, including the United Kingdom’s Office for AI in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, with Deloitte, Salesforce and Splunk, as well as 15 other countries and more than 150 members of government, academia, civil society and the private sector. The development process incorporated workshops and interviews with government procurement officials and private sector procurement professionals, according to a recent account in Modern Diplomacy .
The UK has used the guidelines in procurement processes with its Food Standards Agency. User testing was performed in workshops with the UK Department for Transport and Defense, Science and Technology Laboratory. The testing helped the government define step-by-step guidance documents now in use across departments. It was also picked up by the NHSX, the UK government unit that helps develop best practices for the National Health Service, as guidance for AI purchases.
“The current pandemic has shown us more needs to be done to speed up the adoption of trusted AI around the world,” stated Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the World Economic Forum. “We moved from guidelines to practical tools, tested and iterated them – but this is still just a start. Now we will be working to scale them to countries around the world.”
Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the World Economic Forum Founded in 1971 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum is a non-governmental organization whose mission is to “improve the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas.”
The guidelines were also tested in the United Arab Emirates for a project to develop a chatbot application to help the Dubai Water and Electricity Authority. “As the UAE’s shift towards a knowledge-based economy gathers pace, the country has become a reliable testbed and leader in the development and execution of guidelines and frameworks that enable the large-scale deployment of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence,” stated Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation, the host entity of Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution UAE.
