HfG research group KIM receives full funding from the Volkswagen Foundation

The project "AI Forensics: Accountability through Interpretability in Visual AI Systems" led by Prof. Dr. Matteo Pasquinelli was awarded.

The Volkswagen Foundation's funding initiative "Artificial Intelligence - Its Impact on Tomorrow's Society", established in November 2017, also supports the HfG research project "AI Forensics: Accountability through Interpretability in Visual AI Systems" as one of seven project consortia with 1.4 million euros for a project duration of three years.

With its initiative, the Volkswagen Foundation aims to strengthen cross-disciplinary and cross-national research on the responsible further development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
"Against the backdrop of current and emerging developments taking place under the term "artificial intelligence," the aim is to enable new perspectives and insights with a view to shaping the future of society as well as technology, based on present-day diagnoses," according to the Volkswagen Foundation's official website.

About the project
The research group's project proposes AI forensics as a new sociotechnical framework for the analysis and critique of AI systems. This implies the design and development of new AI forensics tools for examining large AI datasets that cannot be analyzed manually, models (reverse-engineering the black-box effect), and applications (revealing their socio-historical context), making state-of-the-art results from explainable and interactive machine learning accessible to researchers in the humanities and beyond.
The resulting open-source AI forensics toolkit will be able to be used and shared with civic organizations, academia, and industry to investigate the social impact and consequences of AI systems in the field. The AI forensics toolkit will also support four sociotechnical investigations examining the facial recognition production pipeline, interpretability and accountability of AI in the humanitarian sector, bias-aware design methods for AI systems, and the role of visual AI models in science.

By closely integrating machine learning research and sociotechnical analysis, the project creates a new and comprehensive methodological framework to equip the humanities and social sciences with the necessary tools to study the impact of 21st century AI.

About the project participants
Prof. Dr. Matteo Pasquinelli (PhD) is Professor of Media Philosophy at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, where he coordinates the Research Group for Artificial Intelligence and Media Philosophy KIM (kim-hfg-karlsruhe.de). His recent publications include the anthology Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (Meson Press). His research focuses on the intersection of cognitive science, digital economy, and machine learning.

KIM HfG will coordinate a consortium of partners that also includes Prof. Dr. Leonardo Impett and Prof. Dr. Noura Al Moubayed (both Department of Computer Science, Durham University, UK), Prof. Dr. Claude Draude (Scientific Center for Information Technology Design, University of Kassel), and Prof. Dr. Fabian Offert (Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, University of California - Santa Barbara, USA).