“Artificial Intelligence has the potential to improve safety and help law enforcement in tasks that are taxing for human officers (e.g., by alerting for safety risks or forecasting emergency needs in crowds). Yet such systems also pose a significant risk to citizens’ privacy and other human rights, as they rely on often intrusive collection of data. Finding the balance and help to create human-rights-preserving solutions is an important societal challenge,” says Dorotic.
Associate Professor at BI Norweigan Business School Matilda Dorotic.
UNICRI is one of the UN’s five research and training institutes, founded in 1968 to assist the international community in improving policies for crime prevention and criminal justice. The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics was launched in 2015 to understand and address the risks and benefits of AI and robotics in crime and security.
“UNICRI Centre for AI and Robotics is thrilled to collaborate with BI Norwegian Business School and other stakeholders aimed at establishing citizen trust in the responsible use of AI systems for anonymized crowd monitoring. It is yet another step for a wider goal to achieve globally accepted practices for the responsible use of AI by law enforcement and ensuring public trust in this field,” says Irakli Beridze, Head of the UN Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
Will look at public perceptions of AI
“The focus of our collaboration with the UN will be on the ethical, societal and privacy issues related to the use of AI in public safety systems. We will among other things study how different groups perceive AI and how to create guidelines for its responsible use in high-risk contexts. While it is generally understood that the development of such AI systems should follow requirements for privacy protection, non-discrimination, and transparency, it remains unclear how these different requirements should be formulated, how they impact one another, how publics interpret them and how they should be communicated to the public,” Dorotic continues.
The collaboration will start in 2024 and continue for two years. It is part of the ‘AI4Citizens’ project funded by the Research Council of Norway. Partners include NTNU, BI Norwegian Business School, The University of Agder, The University of Sussex, along with public institutions and businesses.
“This agreement will enable our researchers to work closely with UNICRI experts on topics of AI governance and societal impact, with the objective of contributing to the global dialogue on societal security challenges and potential solutions when implementing AI. We look forward to a fruitful and mutually beneficial partnership with UNICRI over the next two years,” says Line Lervik-Olsen, Head of the Department of Marketing at BI Norwegian Business School.