Enabling Trustworthy AI in the Public Sector for the benefit of citizens

The session will revolve around ETAPAS innovative Trustworthy AI approach. ETAPAS is a Horizon 2020 project coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) that aims to improve public service delivery for citizens by facilitating the ethical adoption of Disruptive Technologies in compliance with European and national strategies and guidelines.
Staring from the needs of public administrations (PAs), the session will move from which are the requirements of public sector organisations and how disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence can benefit and increase the added value delivered to citizens. The focus will then shift on how ETAPAS responds to the needs of citizens and PAs. The ETAPAS project Trustworthy AI approach is innovative and pioneer and has been co-created and co-designed together with real public administrations, in an iterative process that is still ongoing and involving four different use cases from public sector organisations. Another innovative aspect of the approach is that it can be tailored on the basis of the AI technology under scope (ML, NP, etc.) and on the basis of different sectors (healthcare, environment, etc.). Furthermore, while the majority of assessment tools available on the market focus on the private sector, the ETAPAS approach is unique since it is one of the few approaches that are specific for the Public Sector, and it allows to assess all phases within the AI lifecycle, from the research phase to the deployment and commercialization phase. Through the ETAPAS methodology and platform it is not only possible to assess ethical aspects, since the added values is that it focuses also on social and legal risks and impacts, in compliance with European and national strategies and guidelines, such as the AI Act.
In order to provide a demonstration of the approach at work, firstly the ETAPAS platform will be briefly presented, an innovative tool that allows to perform trustworthy assessments, and the audience will be involved while showing the tool; secondly, one of the ETAPAS real-life use cases will be presented. In particular, the use case focuses on “Public Organizations Multi-factor Misinformation Handling” and on analysing the ethical, social and legal implications of the adoption of this innovative AI application in the Municipality of Katerini in Greece.
To pull the session together and conclude, the final part will discuss how to increase the outreach and engagement of public sector stakeholders, how to raise interest and expertise in Trustworthy AI, strengthening the ecosystem and delivering specific training programmes.

Presentation of the session: Giovanna Galasso and Roberta Lotti presentation