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The European Commission today named 52 experts to its High Level Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLG), an advisory body tasked with drafting AI ethics guidelines, anticipating challenges and opportunities in AI, and steering the course of Europe’s machine learning investments.
The 52 new members — 30 men and 22 women — were selected from an applicant pool of 500 and come from titans of industry like Bosch, BMW, Bayer, and AXA, in addition to AI research leaders that include Google, IBM, Nokia Bell Labs, STMicroelectronics, Telenor, Zalando, Element AI, Orange, SAP, Sigfox, and Santander. Among the recruits are Jakob Uszkoreit, an AI Researcher in the Google Brain team, and Jaan Tallinn, a founding engineer of Kazaa and Skype and an early investor in Google subsidiary DeepMind.
Consumer advocacy groups, political advisers, academics, legal experts, and civil society bodies are also represented, including digital rights group Access Now, workers’ rights organization ETUC, and algorithmic transparency group AlgorithmWatch.
Members will meet for the first time on June 27, when they’ll begin drafting guidelines covering the “fairness, safety, and transparency” of AI, evaluating current legislation and informing policy. They’ll also establish “outreach mechanisms” to interact with the AI Alliance, a broader European AI stakeholder group announced in April.
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As part of that engagement effort, the Alliance today launched a public online platform of discussion forums, blogs, documents, and events meant to foster conversations about AI. A list of planned AI HLG and AI Alliance meetings, workshops, and consultations will be made available online via the Commission’s Register of Expert Groups.
“Given the broad impact AI is expected to have, the full participation of all actors, including businesses, academics, policy makers, consumer organisations, trade unions, and other representatives of the civil society is essential,” the European Commission wrote in March. “This is why the Commission plans to set up a European AI Alliance to act as a multi-stakeholder forum engaged in a broad and open discussion of all aspects of AI development and its impact on the economy and society.”
Today’s announcement comes just over a month after the White House set up a task force dedicated to U.S. artificial intelligence efforts. In May, alongside technology executives and AI experts, Trump administration officials from the Office of Science and Technology Policy laid out a five-year strategic plan to improve STEM education and open taxpayer data to algorithmic study.
The U.S. and EU aren’t the only superpowers investing heavily in AI. In March, Canada announced the $125 million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which seeks to attract and retain top AI talent and promote collaboration between researchers in the country.
