Sustainable & Resilient Societies

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a powerful and pervasive technology in recent years, influencing numerous aspects of our daily lives. We encounter AI through recommendation algorithms in online stores, voice-activated smartphone assistants, or the widespread use of technologies like ChatGPT. However, its rapid growth and integration into society raise complex questions and concerns among the public. Public opinions on AI vary widely; while some people are enthusiastic about its potential to revolutionize industries and enable breakthroughs in fields such as medicine, others fear that AI could lead to undesirable outcomes, such as a loss of human control or privacy. These views are often shaped by media narratives and the competing interests of different stakeholders, which play a significant role in influencing both public opinion and policy decisions.

Our team of scientists and communication experts aims to enhance the understanding of AI technologies among the Swiss people, with a particular focus on teenagers and female students, to create a positive societal impact. Building on the foundations of our previous project, NewsOnAI, we will expand beyond traditional media such as newspapers and employ diverse methods, including artistic performances and interactive exhibitions. We will design these activities to be highly interactive, encouraging active participation and dialogue. Activities will include themed theater plays that explore AI’s impact on everyday life, exhibitions where participants can interact with AI tools, and workshops specifically designed for teenagers and female students to discuss AI’s future role in society. Feedback collected will include real-time audience reactions, structured questionnaires, and focus group discussions, which will be analyzed to continuously refine and adapt our engagement strategies.

Our primary audience includes Swiss citizens interested in cultural activities, particularly teenagers who are keen to follow new trends. Additionally, we are committed to addressing gender aspects by designing content and activities that specifically appeal to female students. We aim to inspire and empower young women to take on more prominent roles in shaping the digital world, acknowledging that they have historically been underrepresented in these fields. As societal attention shifts toward greater inclusion, our project will contribute to fostering a more balanced and equitable digital future.

While many individuals in our target groups may lack in-depth technical knowledge of AI, they often encounter new AI products, companies, and social issues through various media channels, including newspapers and science fiction movies. As a result, they may be aware of recent developments but also susceptible to misunderstandings and controversies related to technologies such as ChatGPT, Elon Musk's brain-chip startup, and other emerging AI applications. It is crucial to recognize that media portrayal significantly influences public opinion on AI, both positively and negatively. Media creators, even if they are not experts in AI, often produce content that captures public attention, which high-profile figures, including entrepreneurs, CEOs, and politicians, may leverage to advance their agendas. This can sometimes lead to skewed public perceptions, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Given this landscape, it is essential for AI scientists to collaborate with media creators, providing evidence-based insights to ensure accurate and balanced information is shared with the public. Our project fosters such collaboration, ensuring that both the potential and limitations of AI are clearly communicated. By sharing our findings through diverse media outlets, we aim to reach a broad audience, extending beyond Switzerland. Furthermore, our proactive engagement efforts will foster dynamic, two-way communication between scientists and the public, using interactive methods in exhibitions and theater plays to engage teenagers and female students specifically. Analyzing the feedback from these initiatives will provide invaluable insights into public perspectives on emerging technologies. This understanding will guide scientists in pursuing research directions that effectively address societal concerns, demonstrating the tangible benefits of our project for both scientific advancement and societal well-being. We anticipate that our efforts will have a multiplying social impact over time, promoting informed public discourse and a deeper understanding of AI technologies.

Challenges related to “on the move” biometrics are 1/ lower quality live biometric data, and 2/ no time to read the ePassport. Also, fully automatic biometric border control solutions, even with a stop allowed, are currently deployed only for pedestrians in controlled environment. Carmen offers biometric solutions for non-stop border control, suitable for pedestrians and vehicles, in uncontrolled environmental conditions. Travellers’ authentication is achieved in two steps: 1) the biometric data (face, iris, periocular) of travellers is securely stored in their smartphones, thanks to a DTC (Digital Traveler Credential).2) the biometric data is securely transferred from the DTC to the police infrastructure, and compared to the live biometric data collected as the traveller crosses the border control point.
To address a variety of environmental conditions, Carmen uses both NIR and RGB live biometric images and compare them to the reference images that have been acquired with one type of lighting only. To make biometrics more robust, Carmen has a multimodal approach on face iris and periocular regions. In the fraud detection, Carmen detects presentation attacks on moving travellers and searches strange travellers’ behaviour. To address small and large border control points, Carmen enables the use of fix and body-worn cameras. To address travellers in cars or lorries, Carmen detects face images in slowly moving vehicles, through the windows. Travellers in coaches are controlled by border guards walking through the coach, using dedicated portable equipment as they walk. Carmen addresses the robustness of DTC via data injection attacks. Of course, Carmen complies with the existing legal and ethical standards, and privacy is a central concern. Carmen solutions will be demonstrated in operational conditions over the UK - France border, as French and UK border authorities are part of Carmen consortium, using the infrastructure proposed by the partner Brittany Ferries.

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.

Context: Access to factual information is essential for democratic decision-making, public trust, and civic engagement, yet artificial intelligence (AI) enables large-scale creation and dissemination of manipulated content, fabricated narratives, and content amplification that can distort public perception, erode confidence in democratic institutions, and polarize political discourse. These risks threaten to reshape political debates, influence electoral outcomes, and undermine public trust in media sources in Switzerland. Democratic values can be upheld by developing AI tools and governance frameworks to counter disinformation and monitor media framing.

Goals: DEMO-AI is an interdisciplinary research project, driving advances in computing to enhance the resilience of democracy, integrating expertise from law, journalism and communication studies, media and information literacy to ensure that AI-supported solutions align with democratic values and regulations. Four project goals include: AI tools for analyzing news media framing; AI tools for detecting manipulation of audio-visual media; legal research on regulatory frameworks for AI and disinformation in Switzerland; and engaging both the public and professionals in evaluating and testing media tools.

Expected Impact: DEMO-AI will produce tools to analyze issue framing and related narratives in Swiss media, facilitate the detection of audio-visual disinformation, and understand legal challenges. These tools will be designed, tested, and refined in collaboration with the general public and professionals, placing their specific needs at the center, thus ensuring real-world applicability. Through societal impact activities, the project extends beyond technology, addressing key challenges across AI, democracy, and policy.

Alpine lakes (those located above the 2000 m tree line) are excellent sentinels of climate change as their chemistry and biology respond rapidly to environmental forcing. The Swiss alps are host to over 1500 alpine lakes, many of which have been newly mapped and thus never been studied2. Microorganisms play major ecological roles in these ecosystems, including primary production, cycling of elements, and attenuation of contaminants, but it is uncertain how physical climatic changes may affect microbial communities and their activities in alpine lakes. This project aims to: (i) record and monitor the unexplored microbial diversity in Swiss alpine lakes, and (ii) engage citizens in science and spread awareness about environmental conservation through participation in our field campaigns. In summary, 2000LAKES is a project of alpine citizen science aiming to understand the ecological impacts of climate change in alpine lakes and to promote the conservation of alpine microbial ecosystems joining forces between scientists and citizens.

EU borders are constantly faced with a multiplicity of challenges, from increased waves of illegal migration to human trafficking, document fraud, terrorism, smuggling, and public health threats. In the CRiTERIA project we will develop a novel risk analysis methodology, which is, on the one hand, clearly rooted and builds upon existing methodology such as CIRAM and, on the other hand introduces novel more complex and effective indicators, which overcome important limitations of existing models. Such extended risk and vulnerability analysis methodology has to be backed by effective intelligent analysis technology. Building upon existing text, media, data and network analysis technology, in CRiTERIA, we will develop and evaluate advanced analysis technologies and tools that are tailored to the new comprehensive threat indicators of the CRiTERIA methodology. Special focus will be put to the consideration of the role of narratives, events, attitudes, and to the vulnerability of borders and humans as well as on providing semi-automatic tools and methods for risk-related evidence validation and explanation, for identifying risk propagation and interlinking, thus supporting decision processes in risk analysis in an innovative way. When developing this holistic CRiTERIA risk and vulnerability analysis framework for border agencies ethical, legal and societal aspects will be considered from the very beginning. The methodology will be developed in close collaboration with practitioners from border agencies, which will also validate the developed methods and technologies in piloting activities. For achieving its goals CRiTERIA brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts including researchers in the fields of security and risk analysis, in the field of data and media analysis and in the field of ethics, law and societal aspects, as well as border agencies, NGOs and companies.

Les réseaux de chaleur à distance ont un rôle prépondérant à jouer au niveau de l’efficience énergétique permettant la valorisation de chaleur habituellement perdue dans l’environnement. Toutefois, afin d’être rentables par rapport à d’autres sources de chaleur fossiles (gaz, mazout), les exploitants de ces réseaux doivent être en mesure de réduire les pertes dans les conduites tout en assurant un approvisionnement stable toute l’année. Ils doivent aussi prévoir des possibilités d’extension pour utiliser la puissance libérée par les efforts d’efficience énergétique demandés aux bâtiments. Ils doivent ainsi pouvoir optimiser dynamiquement les paramètres de contrôle de leurs réseaux et en simuler les extensions comme fonction de la demande et de la production locale des bâtiments. Le recours à l’intelligence artificielle (le cœur de cette démarche) devra permettre d’effectuer une simulation instantanée en remplacement de la simulation physique explicite des réseaux. Il s’agit de développer un logiciel d’aide à la décision pour les contracteurs avant de procéder à de lourds investissements. Dans les faits, Eguzki va permettre d’une part, d’optimiser l’architecture des réseaux en diminuant les coûts d’investissement et d’autre part d’optimiser l’exploitation et de diminuer les pertes énergétiques du réseau. Une demande de subvention a été faites à Innosuisse sans succès, en raison des objectifs de rentabilité attendus non atteignable par Eguzki.

FactCheck project addresses the critical challenge of distinguishing fact from fiction in the digital information space, exacerbated by the rapid spread of disinformation by social networks and advancements in generative AI. This project proposes to empower human fact checkers with AI-driven tools for analysis and verification of digital media content, including text, images, audio, and video. The project emphasizes a multimodal approach and the integration of AI with human expertise, ensuring that AI assists rather than replaces human judgment. The project consists of three phases: data collection of real and synthetic content across multiple modalities, applying baseline AI-based methods to the collected dataset for fake information detection, and refining AI models with human input. The goal of the project is to create a collaborative human-AI fact-checking toolkit and guidelines on using AI for fact checking that will enhance the accuracy and efficiency of identifying and countering fake information in today's complex digital landscape.