Digital Catapult: Ethics upskilling and tool development for startups
Case study from Digital Catapult.
Background & Description
The Ethics Upskilling Programme is focused on providing startups with practical and impactful ethics tools and the space to discover and learn from each other. The workshops are focused on a specific area of ethics and provide a tool to help startups advance in that specific area, and the complementary peer mentoring sessions allow startups to discuss the tool and to learn from each other.
How this technique applies to the AI White Paper Regulatory Principles
More information on the AI White Paper Regulatory Principles.
Safety, Security and Robustness
The Digital Catapult AI team has a data governance assessment and maturity model that allows organisations to self-evaluate the provenance, processing, storage, and use of their data.
Appropriate Transparency and Explainability
Digital Catapult provides a seminar on data governance and a complementary data ethics questionnaire, which is organised along a set of 5 topics. Completion of the data ethics questionnaire generates a label that visually communicates the status of their data ethics.
Fairness
A key topic of the data ethics questionnaire is regarding fairness and justice, asking participants how they address bias and use participatory processes. We also use human-centred design tools to prompt organisations to think about the impact of their technologies on users.
Accountability and Governance
We have the participants create an ethics MOT at the beginning of the ethics journey to encourage them to identify and prioritise ethics areas and create an ethics roadmap. We also use an ethics maturity model that evaluates how far along organisations are in their ethics journey.
Contestability and Redress
A key topic of the data ethics questionnaire is regarding communication, asking participants how they allow and actively seek feedback.
Why we took this approach
Our first AI assurance model was based on a consultation-style model. However, we realised that without ongoing and extended support, these consultations only create limited change. Whilst we discuss and evaluate specific ethics areas, there is no guidance for how to approach these problems and ways forward. Moreover, most of the consultation time is spent on clarifying the startup’s background. Using this topic and tool-focused approach, we hope to give the startups agency in designing and prioritising their own ethics roadmap, and the tools and approaches needed to start implementing this.
Benefits to the organisation
The Upskilling Programme allows us to develop and recommend tools that can easily allow startups to work towards developing ethical AI.
Limitations of the approach
The success of the programme is based on participants’ proactiveness and willingness to undertake the tools seriously.
Further Links (including relevant standards)
- The Current State of AI Governance
- Getting Started with Responsible Innovation: A Brief but Actionable Primer for Founders
Further AI Assurance Information
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For more information about other techniques visit the OECD Catalogue of Tools and Metrics: https://oecd.ai/en/catalogue/overview
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For more information on relevant standards visit the AI Standards Hub: https://aistandardshub.org/