Principal Investigator: Elisabeth Frankus
Project Team: Julia Schmid, Helmut Hönigmeyer, Milena Wuketich
Project Duration: 2020-2021
Funding: FFG - Ideen Lab 4.0, project no 33755798

Project Information: 

AI systems have great potential for Austrian companies. However, many companies do not yet fully exploit this potential. A lack of trust in and knowledge about these systems are major barriers to their adequate use.

The overall goal of the project is to counteract these challenges by providing comprehensive information validated by experts from different disciplines. An interdisciplinary project team will design an open-access platform, which will present AI use cases in a holistic form and evaluate them according to a developed catalogue of criteria. This means that in addition to providing technical information about the AI systems (to which most presentations of AI systems are reduced), ten selected AI Use Cases will be evaluated from other relevant perspectives (e.g., ethics, sociology, management, psychology, data protection and HCI).

In order to enable a holistic view of relevant use cases at all, a catalogue of criteria including various perspectives has to be developed. This catalogue will be refined and continuously developed in the course of different, combined participative processes (qualitative surveys, focus groups, social design) with focus groups of heterogeneous stakeholders. The selected use cases are evaluated on the basis of this questionnaire. This serves as the basis for creating a concept for the platform.

The development of a platform that comprehensively describes and evaluates a large number of use cases is a time consuming and resource-intensive process that requires prior exploration and consideration of the possibilities and limitations of such a platform. In this exploratory project, the platform will therefore be initially conceptualized in the context of one company example based on 10 use cases.

Such a holistic description of individual AI systems offered in Austria and their application, which also reflects ethical aspects and possible implications, does not yet exist and has the potential to empower companies, thus strengthening Austria as a business location and informing an interested public.

In addition to the primary project goals, the project aims at a SWOT analysis and an innovation readiness assessment of the platform in order to support the decision making regarding further R&D&I projects in the best possible way.