Ethics for the Smart City- an IEAI project
Ethics for the Smart City: Applied socio-technical frameworks to assess the implementation of AI-related solutions.
Duration: September 2022- August 2024
In this project, funded by the Institute of Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at TUM (IEAI), the TUM chair of Transportation Systems Engineering (TSE) collaborates with the Chair of Business Ethics (within the TUM institute for ethics in AI), to bring together an interdisciplinary approach looking at Smart City solutions from both a social sciences and an engineering perspective. The work is also done with external partners, including the municipality of Kirchheim bei München, who provides a social, political and territorial context to the project, as part of the Smart City – Made in DE programme. While drawing advancements towards human-centered Smart Cities, we aim to answer the question: how can we assess AI-enabled solutions implemented on urban settings from a socio-technical perspective? Other external partners include the DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz), who provide expert feedback on the frameworks design and applicability, and Ariadne Maps, who provide access to data and digital mapping technologies and expertise related to data collection and analysis.
To cover as many aspects as possible, the project focuses around three key aspects: sustainability, governance and acceptance, which unfold into four axes: Smart Cities for sustainable development: assessing social and environmental impacts urban governance: transparency and public engagement; data governance: transparency, data policies, privacy, stakeholder accountability; ethics by design: developing and deploying trustworthy technologies. The main outcomes are socio-technical frameworks aiming to steer the ethical development of technology-based solutions and promote their responsible implementation on urban settings.