The Center for AI Certification contributes to the advancement of AI technologies and its responsible use.
The center conducts fundamental research in data lineage, fairness, interpretability, and robustness of AI models. The center supports the responsible and secure deployment of AI technologies and contributes thought leadership and technical expertise to the evolving landscape of AI standards and regulations. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) also emphasize the importance of AI model conformity.
The activities of the center encompass legal and standards analysis, metric formalization, software development, toolbox creation, and data collection. The center will play a key role in providing validation and certification services for AI technologies that are becoming integral to various sectors, and thus the demand for safe, certified AI models is on the rise.
Idiap's expertise and reputation in key domains such as security, human interaction, health and robotics, and the alignment of the center with international standards, including ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 Artificial Intelligence together with its expertise, positions the center as a leader in AI testing and certification. The commitment to international standards and collaboration across all research groups will ensure that the center remains at the forefront of AI technology development and certification.
Along the whole value chain in using data for economic purposes, guidelines and tools are required to make the business of the different stakeholders successful, and the end-users confident that none of their rights are endangered. CERTAIN addresses these needs and delivers solutions for data holders, dataspaces and AI systems providers, and AI systems deployers, which are the primary actors of the data and AI value chain. They must be compliant with applicable European regulations, must reach this compliance in a timely manner, and at reasonable cost.
CERTAIN delivers guidelines and technical tools to help with compliance, to assess data quality, to measure biases in datasets, and to protect privacy. CERTAIN sets the foundation of AI certification: it translates the regulations to business terms, builds a directory of certification entities per business, develops a platform to streamline the certification process, and tools for AI system providers and certification entities so that they could respectively prepare and run a certification process.
In case of security breach, not only privacy may get compromised, but also AI models may become useless and lead to extremely damageable decisions. To make sure that AI-based products are of high quality and reliability, CERTAIN develops security tools and methods, specifically suitable for dataspaces and AI systems.
CERTAIN addresses the environmental footprint of the AI value chain. Innovative techniques are elaborated to reduce energy consumption when building and running AI systems. This is beneficial not only for the green deal but to reduce cost for AI stakeholders.
As importantly, CERTAIN considers the end-users perspective, and provides templates and guidelines that may be used by AI systems deployers to reassure end-users on the use of their private data. The project tests its results on seven operational pilots in six different business areas, considering all the actors along the AI value chain.
Biometric identification systems have the potential to revolutionize humanitarian aid distribution programs by improving their efficiency and reducing allocation fraud. However, biometric data storage introduces privacy risks. We aim to design a privacy-preserving biometric identification system.
