July 5, 2022
NCSR Demokritos and the IEEE Standards Association signed an important agreement for collaboration to promote ethics and its certification in Artificial Intelligence.
In this cooperation, NCSR Demokritos is represented by the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications who played a pivotal role as an international pioneer in Research and Innovation and a key partner of the State in the development of the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The MoU between the parties concerns the design and implementation of collaborations and actions related mainly to the implementation of IEEE certification schemes for AI systems, as well as to the co-creation of views and knowledge exchange in areas of common interest such as AI’s human centricity, democratic access and control, and socio-technical sustainability of systems based on data and machine learning algorithms.
The meeting of the two organisations for the launch of the cooperation, took place at NCSR Demokritos in Aghia Paraskevi on Monday 4 July and was attended by Christos Dimas, Deputy Minister of Development and Investments | Research, Innovation and Technology, Athanasios Kyriazis, Secretary General of GSRI, Konstantinos Karachalios, Managing Director of the IEEE Standards Association.
Representing NCSR Demokritos at the meeting were George Nounesis and Vangelis Karkaletsis as well as researchers from IIT George Giannakopoulos and Alexandros Nousias who will be involved in the implementation of the cooperation.
George Nounesis, Director & Chairman of the Board at NCSR Demokritos stated: Demokritos is a dynamic participant in scientific progress and the rapid technological development of autonomous systems and AI algorithms. The Greek society and national economy will benefit enormously from this technological transformation. We at Demokritos, will participate dynamically equally in the public debate on the ethical challenges aimed at preserving the human-centred character of new technologies. We are excited about the horizons that the partnership with the IEEE opens up precisely in this direction and we look forward to transferring the new knowledge and the results of this cooperation to the Greek State.
Konstantinos Karachalios, Managing Director of the IEEE Standards Association, and a member of the IEEE Management Council stated: The regulatory framework proposed by the European Commission for AI makes it necessary to be able to assess the quality of certain such algorithmic systems. This is precisely the problem solved for designers and users by the IEEE CertifAIEd system developed by the international non-profit organisation IEEE. A system that has already been tested in practice by the City of Vienna. The envisaged collaboration between Demokritos and IEEE will provide the Demokritos team of experts with the necessary know-how to put this method into practice. A similar agreement has been signed between IEEE and the French Ministry of Industry.
Vangelis Karkaletsis, Director of IIT at NCSR Demokritos stated: The democratic nature of both access to and control of AI systems, as well as the design and implementation of such systems, makes it absolutely necessary to create and implement certification procedures and tools for ethical, reliable and democratic AI. For this reason, we have designed relevant seminars in our Institute for graduate programs as well as for the AI and Data Science training programs and have initiated AI systems evaluation procedures for projects we undertake. Our collaboration with the IEEE will significantly enhance our expertise, thereby also contributing to the implementation of the National AI Strategy in the design of which we have played a central role.
