Our activities
Implementing meaningful human control in practice
We are seeking transdisciplinary collaborations with private and public entities that are facing problems related to human control and responsibility in real-world contexts. We work together with professionals developing approaches that enhance human control and empower human responsibility in different domains, including automated mobility, aviation, energy, healthcare, and public services.
We aim to bridge academic research and practice through specific design and engineering approaches that facilitate meaningful human control. In particular, we build up on the four essential properties previously identified by the AiTech initiative:
- Defining and adhering to a Moral Operational Design Domain
- Ensuring compatible representations e.g. through appropriate trust, human-AI interaction, human factors analysis and cognitive modelling.
- Empowering humans to control AI systems both by improving learning and reasoning methods, as designing suitable interaction patterns;
- Tracing responsibility and maintaining human moral awareness in human-AI systems.
Fundamental research on meaningful human control
We conduct conceptual and theoretical research involving interdisciplinary collaborations to define fundamental and context-specific requirements and conditions for meaningful human control. Through these explorations, our goal is to reach actionable guidelines that can shape the development and deployment of responsible AI systems.
The specific topics we explore are:
- How to best understand and conceptualise the alignment between socio-technical systems and human values and reasons;
- What are the social dimensions of MHC, that is what is the role of social justice and empowerment of underrepresented groups in supporting people’s control over technology;
- What are the political dimensions of MHC, that is what is the connection between MHC and democratic participation (in technological development);
- To what extent can MHC accommodate a pluralistic and open-ended approach to ethics, where different values and principles are reflected in socio-technical systems, and new values can emerge and be embedded.
International lighthouse on MHC: community building and education
We organize regular seminars and workshops on meaningful human control in the context of specific domains, encouraging the exchange of ideas and best practices. To stay notified about our future community building events, subscribe to our mailing list. The recordings of our previous seminars are available here.
Our efforts extend to conducting in-depth diagnoses and compiling white papers to provide valuable insights to civil organisations and policymakers, as well as editing special issues and collections around the topic of MHC. One key example of such international collaboration is the publication of the Research Handbook on Meaningful Human Control of Artificial Intelligence Systems, co-edited by members of the centre.
We also offer lectures on meaningful human control to students of multiple MSc programs, including MSc Robotics and MSc Data Science and AI Technology, and provide keynote talks and external lectures to different partners and venues such as the Stichting ICTU and the ESDIT seminar series on Conceptual Engineering for Emerging Technologies.