The goal of the TRAI working group is to bring together TRAI stakeholders who are interested in developing materials, practices, and methods of teaching and adopting Responsible AI. Stakeholders can for example be teachers and students of higher education (current focus is on HBO/WO, we aim to expand to include MBO as well) in Computer Science, AI and related disciplines; upper management, employees, and talent development professionals of Dutch institutions and companies that use AI systems and develop AI policies and strategy; as well as other beneficiaries. We use the term Responsible AI as a broad term referring to the importance of accounting for ethical, legal, societal, environmental and human-centered aspects when developing AI systems.
Aims
Bringing these groups together will facilitate achieving the following specific aims:
Exchanging expertise
Teaching and adopting Responsible AI is challenging due to the inherent multidisciplinary nature of the subject. Responsible AI requires on the one hand deep technical knowledge about AI methods and techniques, and on the other hand insights into the way AI is and could be embedded into organizations and society and associated ethical, legal and societal consequences and risks, combined with an understanding of how one affects the other. Through this working group we bring together teaching practitioners, students and industry and institutional stakeholders of different fields to allow for sharing of expertise, methods, pitfalls, best practices and practical cases in teaching and adopting Responsible AI. In this way we will be able to accelerate the integration of responsible aspects of AI into our curricula and engineering practices, and professionalize our methods and approaches for teaching and adopting Responsible AI.
Community building
Besides exchanging expertise on the content and methods of teaching and adopting Responsible AI, we furthermore aim to create a community through which one can meet others with an interest in the topic and share experiences. The community can also provide support and help for those new to teaching Responsible AI in getting started and finding the necessary resources, thereby lowering the threshold of entering the area.
Agenda setting
Although the importance of Responsible AI is more and more recognized, the traditional separation of engineering and social sciences still informs much of our current teaching and engineering practices. By coming together through this working group, we will increase our impact in putting this topic on the agenda of educational institutions and industry. It will allow us to create a better connection between what is taught and what is practised by, on the one hand, bringing in the visions, hesitations, experiences, obstacles, and so on from engineering practices into our educational programs, while on the other hand sharing the latest scientific insights with industry. Finally, by bringing together a TRAI community we will be able to identify gaps and opportunities across organizations and sectors, e.g. for creating shared educational modules.