We are delighted to announce that the research group KIM HfG Karlsruhe led by Prof. Dr. Matteo Pasquinelli has received the full grant in the funding initiative “Artificial Intelligence and the Society of the Future” of the Volkswagen Stiftung for the project “AI Forensics: Accountability through Interpretability in Visual AI Systems”.
KIM HfG will coordinate a consortium of partners that involves Prof. Dr. Claude Draude (Kassel University), Prof. Dr. Leo Impett (Cambridge University), Prof. Dr. Fabian Offert (University of California Santa Barbara) and Prof. Dr. Noura Al Moubayed (Durham University). Over the project period of three years the grant is endowed with a budget of 1.4 million EUR.
The project proposes AI Forensics as a new sociotechnical framework for the analysis and critique of AI systems. This implies the design and development of new AI forensics tools for the investigation of large AI datasets, models, and applications, which will be shared with civil organisations, public institutions and academia to study the social impact and implications of real-world AI systems.
The project will also support four sociotechnical investigations that will examine: 1) the production pipeline of face recognition; 2) the use of AI in the humanitarian sector; 3) bias-aware design methods for AI systems; and 4) the role of visual AI models in the sciences. Through a close integration of machine learning research and sociotechnical analysis, the project establishes a new and comprehensive methodological framework to equip the humanities and social sciences with the means to investigate the implications of 21st century artificial intelligence.