IRCAI, which operates within the AI department of the Jožef Stefan Institute, has been given the green light for RAIDO (»Reliable AI and Data Optimisation«), a Horizon Europe (Cluster 4) research and innovation project, and will act as its primary coordinator. RAIDO will give rise to a powerful framework designed to support the development of trustworthy and green AI.
Trustworthy AI will be at the heart of RAIDO, emphasizing the critical aspects of reliability, safety, and unbiased optimization and deployment of AI systems. Inside a single integrated framework, it will include guidelines on methods for automated data curation and enrichment, including digital twins and diffusion models, to facilitate the generation of high-quality, representative, unbiased, and compliant data for the development of trustworthy AI models.
Simultaneously, we will be driving the evolution of green AI by crafting energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable AI models. RAIDO will offer data- and compute-efficient models and tools (either with or without reinforcement learning), to facilitate the development of energy-efficient AI. To ensure the transparency, explainability and reliability of the AI models, the framework also provides guidelines on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, decentralized blockchain technology, feedback-based reinforcement learning, new KPIs, and visualization techniques.
The Director John Shawe-Taylor commented “It is with immense pride and pleasure that I announce the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) under the auspices of UNESCO has been awarded a 9 million euro grant focused on trustworthy and green AI. This achievement is a testament to the unwavering dedication, hard work, and expertise of our entire team. I am profoundly proud of each member’s contributions, and I am confident that together, we will continue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence for the betterment of society. My heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in this remarkable milestone.”
The RAIDO infrastructure, operating in the context of edge computing, will introduce an innovative AI orchestrator that optimizes related tasks and processes, reducing the overall energy consumption and environmental footprint of the AI models – in both the development and implementation stage. RAIDO also emphasizes the development of dynamic interfaces that support relevant AI paradigms (centralized, distributed, dynamic and hybrid).
The RAIDO project will eventually be evaluated using four demonstrators in important application domains including smart grids, smart agriculture, healthcare, and robotics.
The project consists of 29 partners and is worth nearly 9 million euros. Project activities will begin in early 2024 and last for three years.
RAIDO is the latest project in IRCAI’s recent line of grants: Throughout the past year, IRCAI has been brought on board of six other Horizon Europe projects. RAIDO is, however, the first project of this scale in which IRCAI plays a coordinating role.
