Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance of Digital Twins (TEA-DT)

数字孪生的可信和道德保证 (TEA-DT)

• 批准号: AH/Z505663/1
• 负责人: Christopher Burr
• 金额: $ 32.39万
• 依托单位: The Alan Turing Institute
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FZ505663%2F1
• 关键词: Trustworthy; Ethical; Assurance; Digital; Twins

In recent years, considerable effort has gone into defining "responsible" AI research and innovation. Though progress is tangible, many sectors still lack the tools and capabilities for operationalising and implementing ethical principles. Furthermore, many project teams also find it challenging to know how to achieve goals, such as fairness or explainability, and communicate that they have been realised to other stakeholders of affected users. If ignored, these gaps could hamper efforts to build public trust in AI technologies or amplify existing societal harms and inequalities caused by biased and non-transparent sociotechnical systems. The Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance for Digital Twins (TEA-DT) project will develop an existing open-source platform, known as the Trustworthy and Ethical Assurance (TEA) Platform, which has been designed to help users navigate the process of addressing the aforementioned challenges. The TEA platform helps users and project teams define, operationalise, and implement ethical principles as goals to be assured, and also provides means for communicating how these goals have been realised. It achieves this by guiding individuals and project teams to identify the relevant set of claims and evidence that justify their chosen ethical principles, using a participatory approach that can be embedded throughout a project's lifecycle. The output of the platform—a user-generated assurance case—can be co-designed and vetted by various stakeholders, fostering trust through open, clear, and accessible communication. The TEA platform consists of three main elements: 1) an online tool for crafting well-reasoned arguments about ethical goals, 2) user-friendly guidance to foster critical thinking among teams and organisations, and 3) a supportive community infrastructure for sharing and discussing best practices. Although the platform is designed for a wide range of applications, the TEA-DT project will specifically focus on digital twins—virtual duplicates that are closely coupled to their physical counterpart to enable access to data and insights that can improve and optimise the way their real-world versions operate. More specifically, the project team will carry out scoping research on the assurance of digital twins within three different contexts: health, natural environment, and infrastructure. Although digital twins promise vast societal benefit in these areas, the fact that they increasingly rely on various forms of AI and often operate in safety-critical settings, means that several challenges must be addressed to ensure their ethical and trustworthy development. For instance, in health, questions about data privacy and ownership arise; environmental applications must tackle bias and fairness issues, complicated by global scales and differing laws; and in infrastructure, technical challenges concerning uncertainty communication give rise to additional needs for transparency and explainability. In collaboration with key partners and stakeholders, the TEA-DT project will carry out scoping research to co-develop exemplary assurance cases and enhance the platform's features to make it more user-friendly and integrated into workflows. By committing to open research and community-building principles, the project aims to a) systematically share best practices and standards, b) make the operationalisation of ethical principles more accessible and inclusive, and c) integrate the project sustainably with existing networks and communities.

近年来，人们在定义“负责任的”人工智能研究和创新方面付出了巨大的努力，尽管取得了切实的进展，但许多行业仍然缺乏实施和实施道德原则的工具和能力。此外，许多项目团队也发现了解如何实施具有挑战性。实现公平性或可解释性等目标，并向受影响用户的其他利益相关者传达这些目标已经实现的信息。如果忽视，这些差距可能会阻碍建立公众对人工智能技术的信任的努力，或放大由偏见和偏见造成的现有社会危害和不平等。数字孪生的可信和道德保证（TEA-DT）项目将开发一个现有的开源平台，称为可信和道德保证（TEA）平台，旨在帮助用户导航TEA 平台帮助用户和项目团队定义、实施和实施道德原则作为需要保证的目标，并提供沟通如何实现这些目标的方法。个人和项目团队使用可以嵌入到整个项目生命周期的参与性方法来识别证明其选择的道德原则的相关主张和证据。平台的输出（用户生成的保证案例）可以共同进行。 TEA 平台由各个利益相关者设计和审查，通过开放、清晰和易于访问的沟通来培养信任：1) 一个在线工具，用于就道德目标提出合理的论点；2) 方便用户的指导，以促进道德目标。之间的批判性思维团队和组织，以及 3) 用于共享和讨论最佳实践的支持性社区基础设施 尽管该平台是为广泛的应用而设计的，但 TEA-DT 项目将特别关注数字孪生——与其紧密耦合的虚拟副本。更具体地说，项目团队将在三个不同的背景下进行数字孪生的范围研究：健康、自然环境、和基础设施。数字孪生有望在这些领域带来巨大的社会效益，但事实上，它们越来越依赖各种形式的人工智能，并且经常在安全关键的环境中运行，这意味着必须解决一些挑战，以确保其道德和值得信赖的发展，例如在健康领域。 ，有关数据隐私和所有权的问题出现；环境应用程序必须解决因全球规模和不同法律而变得复杂的偏见和公平问题；在基础设施方面，有关不确定性通信的技术挑战引起了与主要合作伙伴合作的透明度和可解释性的额外需求。和利益相关者，TEA-DT 项目将开展确定研究范围，共同开发示范性保证案例并增强平台的功能，使其更加用户友好并融入工作流程。通过致力于开放研究和社区建设原则，该项目旨在 a) 系统地分享最佳实践和标准， b) 使道德原则的实施更加容易和更具包容性，以及 c) 该项目可持续地与现有网络和社区相整合。