April 2024

Welcome to our second newsletter!

Over the past few months, the AI4Gov consortium has achieved significant productivity. We have now advanced to the stage of creating initial versions of our tools, customizing them to align with the specific needs of our pilot use cases.

We've fostered collaborations and synergies with other projects and associations, and actively participated in various conferences and events, raining awareness about our initiatives. Below you can find relevant resources, including publications, deliverables, and training materials.

Events

During the past few months, AI4Gov was presented at the following events:

1. Biotechnology summer school 2023, Ljubljana, Slovenia
2. Major Cities of Europe, Prato, Italy
3. ASEFClassNet16 Conference: “Leading Change: Digital Transformation of Education in the Era of AI”, Ljubljana, Slovenia
4. 8th SEEDA-CECNSM conference, Piraeus, Greece
5. AI4Gov Educational Workshop on the role and impact of AI in Local Government and Governance, Thessaloniki, Greece
6. Latin America and Caribbean Days (LAC days), Ljubljana, Slovenia
7. AI UK Fringe event, online

From these events, AI4Gov organized:

AI4Gov Educational Workshop on the role and impact of AI in Local Government and Governance

Last November, AI4Gov organized in Thessaloniki, Greece, a full-day hybrid event with two panel discussions and an educational workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in public governance, exclusively for the Greek audience.

More than 160 people participated, including members of municipal councils and the academic community, experts and civil associations, while the event was welcomed by representatives of the Ministry of Digital Governance, as well as Regional and Local Government.

The presentations - in Greek - are available in our YouTube channel.

AI UK Fringe event

AI4Gov has formed a cluster - the AI, Big Data, and Democracy taskforce (AIBD&D) - with the KT4D, ITHACA, and ORBIS projects, to exchange ideas and explore synergies. We have already used the Horizon Results Booster? services for identifying a joint portfolio of results and drawing a common communication and dissemination plan.

To this end, we organized our first joint workshop, as part of the AI UK Fringe event, that included:

?? Keynote speeches of AI Democracy & Ethics experts followed by a short panel discussion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhLul_qADcM

?? Series of live demonstrations of modern tools for using AI in deliberative settings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7FiVavFwBQ

ΑΙ4Gov was represented by:

• Fabiana Fournier from IBM, with the keynote speech: “Trustworthy and Explainable AI in Policy Making: How can we enhance trustworthiness, fairness and explainability of the modern AI by enabling humans to reason about the outcomes of AI-based models.”
• Andreas Karabetian, from University of Piraeus, with the live demonstration: “A Self-Explained Visualization Workbench: a Bias Detection Toolkit that empowers policymakers, researchers, and practitioners with understanding tailored for detecting biases in AI systems.”

Resources

Deliverables

This is the list of AI4Gov's public deliverables submitted after our first newsletter, pending acceptance by the EC:

?? D4.1 Trustworthy, Explainable, and unbiased AI V1

This document describes the following tools and technologies:

• Virtualized Unbiasing Framework (VUF) for AI & Big Data – Bias Detector Toolkit
• SAX4BPM Library, for Situation Aware eXplainability
• Strategies to Improve Citizen Engagement and Trust utilizing NLP

?? D4.3 Policies Visualization Services V1

This document describes the Visualization Workbench that serves as a centralized platform for innovative solutions at the intersection of artificial intelligence and governance. It integrates tools like the Bias Detector Toolkit and Policy Recommendation Toolkit, showcasing the pivotal role of visualization services in AI policy formulation and bias detection.

?? D7.2 Dissemination, Communication, Standardization Activities Report V1

This document reports on the dissemination, communication and standardization activities carried out during the first year of the project.

Blog posts

Our blog series now includes four new posts, where AI4Gov partners delve into topics related to project innovations, technologies and their impact on preserving human rights within a dynamic landscape of technology and regulations.

1. Leveraging Self-Sovereign Identity and European Blockchain Services Infrastructure for Transparency In AI, by UBITECH
2. Holistic Regulatory Framework: AI4Gov’s Tool for Ethical and Democratic AI, by ViLabs
3. Would you trust a Large Language Model to help explain institutional processes?, by IBM
4. Unleashing the potential of AI: EU AI Act and its policy implications, by Siemens

The entire blog series is available here.

Publications

1. Manias G. et al. (2023). AI4Gov: Trusted AI for Transparent Public Governance Fostering Democratic Values. ?Proceedings of the 2023 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT), Pafos, Cyprus, pp. 548-555. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10257230
2. Mavrogiorgos K. et. al. (2023, December 1-3). A Question Answering Software for Assessing AI Policies of OECD Countries [Paper Presentation]. 4th European Symposium on Software Engineering (ESSE 2023), Napoli, Italy. https://doi.org/10.1145/3651640.3651651
3. Fournier F. et al. (2023). The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies [Manuscript submitted for publication]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14975
4. Fahland D. et al. (2023). How well can large language models explain business processes? [Manuscript submitted for publication]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12846

Exciting times lie ahead!

We have an array of engaging workshops, webinars, and training events in the pipeline. These sessions will provide you with practical, hands-on exposure to our tools, allowing you to tailor them to address your unique challenges and requirements.

Keep an eye out by subscribing to our newsletter and visiting our website.

Τhe AI4Gov team!