On the ethical AI road to safety
Europe may have made some progress in reducing road fatalities since 2019, but it is still far from its target of halving the number of road deaths by 2030. While AI and emerging transport technologies offer new opportunities for innovative solutions to tackle this problem, they need to be deployed in a responsible, equitable, efficient and context-sensitive manner. To make this a reality, Europe needs highly skilled experts capable of steering these developments, and this is where IVORY comes in. Launched in November 2023, the project aims to develop a new framework for AI integration in road safety and to nurture a new generation of leading researchers in this field. With this in mind, it has started training 15 researchers on new responsible AI applications for road user assistance and infrastructure safety management. “The 15 PhD projects cover a variety of topics on how to conceptualise and operationalise moral principles like fairness, privacy and transparency in AI, how to develop advanced driver assistance systems and automated systems that interact seamlessly and effectively with the driver and the environment, and how to manage road infrastructure by fusing various static and dynamic data to predict and map road risk,” explains Dr Eleonora Papadimitriou, IVORY project coordinator and associate professor of transport safety at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.
Eyes trained to the future
The project’s first year was devoted to setting up the infrastructure and resources needed to recruit and train the PhD students. Over the next 3 years, the focus will be on developing the IVORY concepts and applications through the work conducted by the researchers, so as to unlock AI’s full potential in the field of road safety. IVORY (AI for Vision Zero in Road Safety) will introduce new knowledge, methods and AI tools to improve road safety. The results will be accessible to universities, industry and policymakers. “We will also launch an open web platform, including the project outputs, training material and social networking functionalities, in order to support the growth of a new community of researchers on AI for road safety,” states Papadimitriou. If you are interested in having your project featured as a ‘Project of the Month’ in an upcoming issue, please send us an email to editorial@cordis.europa.eu and tell us why!
Keywords
IVORY, AI, road safety, transport, safety