The University of Amsterdam is collaborating with TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science) for research into the impact of intelligent autonomous systems on society and the adoption of AI-based systems. To that end, the three organisations signed a Letter of Intent on Tuesday, 1 October 2019, entitled "Meaningful Control of Autonomous Systems" (MCAS).
Central to this collaboration are the regulation of AI-based systems and the values and legal/ethical principles that ultimately make such control meaningful.
The three organisations complement each other well in this area. TNO has knowledge about safe data sharing, explainable AI and human behaviour, and applies this knowledge to innovations in the automotive sector, the legal and safety domains and the financial sector. CWI specialises in deep learning and statistical machine learning. The UvA has, on the one hand, the Faculty of Law with all its legal and ethical knowledge, and, on the other hand, the Informatics Institute with its knowledge of deep learning, information retrieval, computer vision and secure data exchange. Moreover, with the Innovation Center for AI (ICAI) and Amsterdam Data Science also based in the city, there is ready access to the national and regional ecosystem around AI and Data Science.
In the coming period, the parties within MCAS will focus on case studies in two application areas, namely autonomous and cooperative driving and justice and public services. These will be the centres of growth from which larger initiatives will be developed.
