The founding of the first European platform for AI will be coordinated by French group Thales, as selected by the European Commission, and was launched in Barcelona on the 10^th of January 2019. The project, which should be operational in 2019, has a budget of 20 million euros and is meant to bring more visibility to the European AI ecosystem. The AI4EU platform is part of the European AI strategy.

Besides the platform, Thales was tasked with turning an active ecosystem into a federation, beyond the 79 partners from 21 EU member states.

The project’s aim is to boost the technological and industrial capability of Europe by strengthening the union’s industrial competitiveness and accelerating AI’s adoption in the whole of the economy. Europe wants to become front-runner in AI globally, bringing novel views with strong ethical dimensions.

The project aims to create an observatory to handle ethical, legal, socio-economic and cultural issues, or ELSEC, which has to facilitate the reflection on AI’s relation to humanity and the development of explicable and verifiable AI.

Thales is in charge of both projects and will also develop AI elements – tools, modules, knowledge, algorithms. These elements have to be user-friendly without prior knowledge or education so they can be made available to the European community for Information and Communication Technologies. This community will help other users, such as SME’s, start-ups, entrepreneurs, scientists and industrials, in the use of the elements.

The three year project is meant to unite the AI ecosystem in Europe to favour sharing and jointly developing new solutions in the domains of the European economy: robotics, health, media, agriculture, the Internet of Things and cybersecurity.

They will also provide key elements for the future proposition for an AI strategy agenda; polls are posted on the project’s Twitter page so active, direct communication and consultation with civil society is possible.

Source: http://ai4eu.org, @AI4EU