The collective of the Confiance.ai programme, bringing together 13 key industrial and academic founding partners (Air Liquide, Airbus, Atos, CEA, Inria, Naval Group, Renault, Safran, IRT Saint Exupery, Sopra Steria, IRT SystemX, Thales and Valeo) and, more broadly, an ecosystem of close to 50 partners including startups and SMEs, together with a German consortium gathering 10 industrial, academic and civil society partners (including Bosch, Siemens, Technische Universität Darmstadt, SAP, ITAS/KIT, iRights.Lab, Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Institut, BASF, TÜV-SÜD, IZEW Universität Tübingen) led by VDE, one of the largest technology organizations in Europe based in Germany, are announcing a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC).
This strong alliance between key players in France and Germany, representing a wide range of industrial sectors strategic for Europe, aims to support the future European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI Act), by creating in 2023 a combined Franco-German label on trustworthy and responsible AI, which will be closely connected to future harmonized standards. It will strive to provide guidelines and specifications for the applications of AI and help ecosystems take necessary measures in order to conform to the AI Act.
In practice, the players will offer a common frame of reference on trustworthy AI (features necessary for reliability, evaluation frame of reference, and key performance indicators). This frame of reference will be based on the combination of work carried out by each player and will address issues of ethics, responsibility and security. It will also be possible to extend this framework to issues of sustainable development in connexion with AI.
Together, they will strive to bring this label on a European level, offering a governing structure, future European industrial alliance on AI, in order to ensure its promotion and circulation.
“The Confiance.ai collective has been working for many months with the German ecosystem. The strength of this alliance involving key industrial and academic partners lies in the will to promote a common vision of trustworthy and responsible AI, and to create a label dedicated initially to Franco-German collaboration, but which is designed to be brought on a European level”, explains Julien Chiaroni, Director of the great Challenges (Directeur des Grands Défis) in the General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI).
“Consensus on the principles of the responsible use of AI – such as transparency, fairness, privacy protection, reliability and accountability – is quite straightforward. The big challenge is the operationalisation of such principles. With the AI Trust Standard & Label we have presented a practical approach from a German perspective and are looking forward to not only further evolve it but also to integrate it with French and ultimately European work. The synergies are enormous”, adds Sebastian Hallensleben, Head of Digitalisation & AI at VDE.
