Kit media
The Confiance.ai program collective bringing together 13 leading 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 nearly 50 partners including startups and SMEs, and a German consortium bringing together 10 industrial partners, Academics and civil society (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 Europe's largest technology organisations based in Germany, announce a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC).
This close alliance between key players in France and Germany, representing a significant number of strategic industrial sectors for Europe, aims to support the future European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI Act), by creating in 2023 a common Franco-German label on AI of trust and responsible which will be closely linked to future harmonised standards. It aims to provide guidelines and specifications for AI applications and prepare ecosystems to get up and running towards compliance with the AI Act.
Concretely, these actors will propose a common reference framework on trusted AI (characteristics necessary for reliability, evaluation reference and key performance indicators). This framework will be based on the pooling of previous work carried out by each and will address issues of ethics, responsibility, safety and may also extend to environmental issues related to AI.
Together, they will aim to carry this label on a European scale and will also propose a governance structure, a future European industrial alliance on AI, to ensure its promotion and dissemination.
"The Confiance.ai collective has been collaborating with the German ecosystem for many months. The strength of this alliance between leading industrial and academic partners lies in our desire to promote a common vision of AI that is trusted and responsible, and to create a label initially dedicated to the Franco-German level, but which will be worn on a European scale," explains Julien Chiaroni, Director of the Grand Défi IA at the General Secretariat for Investment.
"The consensus on the principles of responsible use of AI – such as transparency, fairness, privacy, trustworthiness and accountability – is quite obvious. The challenge lies in the operational implementation of these principles. With our AI Trust Standard & Label, we have developed a practical approach from Germany's point of view and we look forward not only to developing it, but also to integrating it into French and, eventually, European work. The potential for synergies is considerable," adds Sebastian Hallensleben, Head of Digital Transition and AI at VDE.
