Responsible application of emerging data driven technologies require integral impact monitoring. The case of the AI ELSA Labs in the Dutch public safety context

• In Event: Methodology and law enforcement

Abstract

As the main societal challenge is the responsible adoption of AI applications by public authorities, an ELSA lab supports public authorities to create commonly shared goods and values, while engaging societal stakeholders in specific ELSA Lab activities to build and sustain increased trust in these authorities and their growing expertise on applied AI. In turn, these lab activities also engage the actors in the public policy life cycle and instrumentation of municipalities and safety regions, that way adding to resilient and innovative democratic institutions. Public awareness creation and mobilizing citizens’ expertise via citizen science is the second and enabling societal challenge, while developing and testing intelligence enhancing ELS methods for public authorities and citizen science, including data- and computational power sharing.

Emerging data applications and technologies for safety & security are at the core of the network of dedicated ELSA Labs that is being organized with major cities in the North-Brabant region of The Netherlands.

The ELSA Labs bring together police, municipalities, safety regions, technology developers, and citizen initiatives to address such questions by facilitating the equitable transition towards a novel socio-public partnership for public safety, established on fair and responsible data use, exchange, and AI applications.
Drawn from socio-technical methodologies and tailored to the concrete cross-cutting needs of specific regional communities, contextualized and responsible approaches will be developed to center AI, big data, IoT-centric service ‘experiments’ around participants rather than technologies.

The authors present and discuss the ELSA Lab approach, the portfolio of qualitative methods, and the first insights from specific socio-technical experiments on smart public safety.

Authors

• Ben Kokkeler, Avans University of Applied Sciences

• Peter Novitzky, Avans University of Applied Sciences