Dec 12. 2024

ALFIE’s Kick-Off Meeting held in Nicosia

From the 21st to the 22nd of November 2024, ALFIE (https://alfie-project.eu) held its kick-off meeting in Nicosia, Cyprus. This was the first time partners met in person to discuss and plan our activities for the coming months of the project.

ALFIE with the grant number 101177912 stands for Assessment of Learning Technologies and Frameworks for Intelligent and Ethical AI.

The ALFIE project will create an ecosystem that combines advanced AI technology with ethical standards, ensuring that the resulting AI systems are high-performing, fair, transparent, and with limited bias. The project focuses on building two key components:

  1. EthiTech Dialogue Hub (ETD-Hub): A platform for dialogue and collaboration where AI experts, policymakers, legal professionals, and citizens can discuss and shape the ethical and legal aspects of AI. This platform will serve as a hub for exchanging ideas, understanding societal needs, and defining policies that ensure AI technologies are used responsibly. 
  2. AutoML Platform: A platform allowing for the creation of AI models and solutions through interaction in natural language, with an emphasis on multilingualism. This includes adapting large language models for translating user queries into inputs to the AutoML engine to enable the creation of AI models and solutions and their explanations to the users in a language they can understand. The platform will prioritise ethics and compliance with EU regulations, helping ensure that AI models are fair, transparent, and trustworthy.
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“In ALFIE, we aim to empower individuals with different backgrounds to harness the power of AI without needing to be experts. Using natural language processing to enable interaction in speech and text and AutoML, we’re researching methods that bridge the gap between user requirements and machine learning solutions, making AI more accessible to those who can benefit from that – people. “

Martin Tamajka

Research Engineer at KInIT

ALFIE consortium consists of ten experienced and committed partners. Led by the SME Catalink Limited, it has one industrial partner (Bosch), and two SMEs, Distributed Analytics Solutions (DAS) and Diadikasia Business Consulting (DBC), with strong exploitation and innovation interest in the AI domain.

There are two research partners, CERTH and Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT), and four academic partners (University of Brighton, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edge Hill University, and Eindhoven University of Technology).

The ten partners are from six different European countries, namely, Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia, Spain, Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with broad geographic coverage, as well as combining expertise in several different disciplines.

Two special guests participated in our KOM. From the advisory board, Yannis Manololopulis, Professor Emeritus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Member of Academia Europaea, London.  Yannis is an expert on data management and will follow the progress of the project. Professor Dr Lilian Mitrou also attended the first day of the KOM. She is a professor at the University of the Aegean-Greece (Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering). As an expert in law and data protection law, she will be acting as the External Ethical Advisor for ALFIE.

Over the course of two days, partners worked together to shape project work over the coming months in regard to developing AI models, use cases, technological requirements, communication and dissemination.

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“In the ALFIE project, we aim to better understand the practical application and effectiveness of ethical principles within existing frameworks for trustworthy AI by engaging with a broad range of stakeholders. Specifically, we seek to address two key questions. First, which ethics frameworks and tools are most familiar to stakeholders, and how do these frameworks address the requirements of trustworthy AI? Second, which dimensions of moral sensitivity are considered in these frameworks? Based on the insights gathered, we aim to identify areas for improvement in ethics frameworks and their use.”

Juraj Podroužek

KInIT Lead and Researcher

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