ETAPAS

Project name: ETAPAS
Project leader: Barbro Förding  and Sven Ove Hansson
Participating universities/companies/other organisations: Royal Institute of Technology, Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Srl (PwC), 2021.AI, SINTEF AS, Sem & Stenersen Prokom AS, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Italian Institute of Technology​​​​​​​, The Lisbon Council For Economic Competitiveness and Social Renewal Asbl (LC)​​​​​​​, Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)​​​​​​​, Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus (FDG)​​​​​, Municipality of Katerini (MUKA), University of Graz (UNIGRAZ)​​​​​​​, Karolinska Institutet (KI)​​​​​​​.
Project period: 2020–2023
Financing: EU Horizon 2020

Outcomes:
- Support for Public Administrations to identify and manage the ethical and legal risks generated by the adoption of Disruptive Technologies.
- Methodology and new set of tools for Public Administrations to assess ethical and social impacts from the adoption of Disruptive Technologies,
applied to real-life use cases.
- Recommendations and guidelines, impact pathways and business models for the exploitation of the specific Disruptive Technologies by the
public sector.

What’s the ethical, social and legal impact of the use of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics or Big data in the Public Sector, and how to deal with it? How can we correctly evaluate and govern the ethical implications of DTs adoption by Public Administrations and Public Service providers, taking into account the impact that these technologies can have on citizens’ lives? How can we securely manage DTs and the data they process?

This is the problem that the Consortium Partners want to address in the ETAPAS project and will be achieved by introducing three main tools:

- a Responsible Disruptive Technology Framework (RDT Framework) including a Code of Conduct (CoC) setting out ethical principles, an overview of ethical risks and social impacts of DTs, RDT indicators to practically measure those risks and impacts, and a European legal framework;
- a Governance model; and
- a prototypical software platform.

Our approach aims at making these tools as practical as possible to support PAs with a responsible adoption of DTs through a careful assessment of the trustworthiness of their development and use. This includes the analysis of a large variety of multidisciplinary aspects, spanning over technical - e.g. security and accountability of employed algorithms - ethical and legal implications - e.g. value-aligned actions, discrimination of groups, and data privacy protection – social and governance ones - e.g., transparent and interpretable decision-making.

For more information please see the project website ETAPAS .

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