"positive outcome for our society and environment generated by ethical, trustworthy, and legal AI systems."

• operationalise European and global guidelines for ethical and trustworthy AI.
• develop processes and tools to enable legal AI.
• drive the adoption of standards for ethical, trustworthy, and trustworthy AI.
• promote ethical AI as a force for positive outcomes for our society and environment.
• develop an inclusive network of AI actors from industry, academia and society.

etami joins scientific excellence in ethical, trustworthy, and legal AI with commercial expertise and requirements. In a unique collaboration between science and commerce, all parties collaborate to create an open framework for ethical, trustworthy, and legal AI.

We don’t create ethical AI, but enable it. We believe that AI can be used to solve many problems in society, but it must be done carefully. You cannot blindly trust the output of a neutral network, not even if you trust the good intentions of those who programmed and trained them. Only the proper safeguarding, the right tools, and the correct processes can minimise risk and enable the mitigation if something goes wrong.

etami operates as a Task Force in the non-profit organization BDVA. It is our goal to create open tools, processes and standards for the world to benefit from.

• purpose-driven, acknowledged scientific approaches, respects fundamental ethical research principles
• expertise in AI design, development, deployment, AI & law, as well as domain specific
• collaborative, credible, optimistic
• inclusive, accessible, approachable

• AI & law
• AI incidents data base analysis
• AI life cycle models
• AI auditing / ML testing
• AI explainability / Transparent AI
• AI security
• AI privacy
• AI fairness
• Documentation practices for AI systems
• Data quality

• large industry actors
• small or medium enterprises
• academia / research institutions
• public bodies
• associations and others

• Become a BDVA member

• shape the future of ethical and trustworthy AI with us.
• gain a comprehensive understanding of the versatile socio-cultural and sectoral challenges in context with AI ethics
• as a strong alliance, etami represents its partners towards politics with regard to ethical AI
• etami provides its partners a platform and infrastructure for exchange

• Become a BDVA member

The finesse of a definition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is influenced by the goal, that that definition should reach. This also means that, once a definition is placed, it should not be used out of its context, in other realms.

Therefore, we recommend you to read our glossary entry on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which places the term within a regulary framework and aligns it with the corresponding environment.

• etami open guidebook

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced to a standard tool to improve efficiency in various contexts with pilots and applications in, for example, fraud detection, hiring and law enforcement. At the same time, it is widely recognized that the deployment of AI can bring about ethical issues. In the past years, AI-related controversies arose across a variety of cases revealing issues ranging from surveillance, to biases and discrimination of ethnic minorities, and problems with the reliability and security of such technologies.

In his open library “AI, Algorithmic and Automation Incident Controversies (AIAAIC)”, Charlie Pownall collected more than 850 incidents and controversies driven by and relating to AI and AI-related technologies across the world since 2012, based on media reports, of which etami analysed 125 incidents within their sectoral context (police, healthcare, automotive, education/academia, politics). The report is soon to be published.

• AIAAIC repository

In recent years a number of AI ethics guidelines have been released, of which Thilo Hagendorff analysed and compared 22, in his in 2020 published paper "The Ethics of AI Ethics: An Evaluation of Guideline". As a result the paper provides an detailed overview of the field of AI ethics.

• Overview of AI ethics guidelines

Implementing AI-based systems in a responsible and reliable way can be challenging. Guidelines exist but are insufficient. Good tools and guidelines that make software adhere to such principles do not exist yet.

On the basis of existing guidelines, etami conceives methodologies, tools, and best practices to develop and deploy AI software that adheres to such guidelines.

Those guidelines – we focus on the EC HLEG-AI Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI, the OECD AI Principles, and the UNESCO Recommendations on the Ethics of AI – are excellent. And yet, they are not actionable: from these, there is no clear pathway of how to adhere to them.

How do we make such guidelines actionable? How do we develop a framework through which trustworthy AI can be developed? To address these questions, we postulate four pragmatic principles, which will act as guidance towards reaching our goals.

• etami open guidebook

• be aware of ethical, and legal concerns at an early stage, when correcting measures are more easily implementable
• compliance is hard to achieve at a later stage if the right processes were not implemented early enough in the design and development of AI systems
• public awareness increases

Click the button below to get directly forwarded to the official website of the European Union and read the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down harmonised rules on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act).

• Artificial Intelligence Act