Towards a European AI regulation: a perspective from our community
As a result of several community-driven workshops and discussions, BDVA/DAIRO releases a position paper for the EC’s new proposal for AI regulation. The association appreciates the Commissions efforts to balance between regulation and innovation and the idea of new rules aiming to facilitate investment and innovation. The association points out the possible legislative burden the new rules can cause to small companies and research and education organisations. Therefore, to ensure the successful implementation of the regulation, sufficient investment is needed. BDVA/DAIRO acknowledges the EC’s Coordinated Plan on AI as a way to provide this support.
To accelerate the adoption of Industrial and trustworthy AI in Europe, the association stresses the need to develop and invest in engineering and standardisation frameworks for Industrial and Trustworthy AI (such as the BDVA/DAIRO collaboration with the Franco-German initiative). It also wishes to see strong collaboration with national initiatives to coordinate efforts on Industrial AI.
BDVA/DAIRO agrees with the EC’s view on the importance of Data Quality and Data Governance for AI and underlines the connection between data and AI. In this respect, BDVA/DAIRO welcomes the link of the proposal to AI regulation to GDPR and emphasizes alignment is needed with the Data Governance Act, upcoming Data Act and other legislative acts. The community stresses the need for different metrics, especially for data quality and risk assessment in alignment with standardization efforts and results, but also in other areas such as, interpretability, explainability, predictive accuracy, robustness, fairness and computational complexity.
The community also provides feedback on the scope and impact of the draft AI regulation and how it addresses trustworthiness, risk assessment and classification, life-cycle of products and opportunities for SME’s. From the perspective of small companies, access to knowledge, testing, experimentation and ecosystems is paramount.
Concerning the support to SMEs and startups, BDVA/DAIRO finds investments in federated experimental networks, such as the European Federation of i-Spaces or Digital Innovation Hubs, highly important as they are key to provide access to knowledge, innovation, testing and experimentation facilities, and ecosystem to SMEs and startups. They also offer opportunities to legislators supporting collaboration with innovators and standardization experts, the paper points out.
The paper was shaped by the BDVA/DAIRO members in series of workshops and discussions. BDVA/DAIRO congratulates and thanks the main editors and all the collaborators for their efforts. We are proud of our community’s active and insightful contributions to the work towards the European regulation for artificial intelligence and are looking forward to continuing this endeavor together.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at info@core.bdva.eu.
