NordAId: Trustworthy AI in Public Decision Making

Nordic and Baltic states present a puzzle in the responsible use of AI in public decision-making. The region is uniquely well-positioned with high quality datasets, strong AI communities, and relatively high public trust in human and even AI-based decision-making. However, a range of challenges have arisen. Data is difficult to access, insufficient attention has been paid to trustworthiness and Nordic regulatory requirements, and, as a result, existing efforts tend to be under-specified and focus on ‘low hanging fruits’ that are difficult to scale.

The NordAId project will seek to address this by focusing on asylum decision-making. Empirical evidence of bias and noise in human decision making means that there is a strong interest in AI in this domain. Vice versa, asylum decision-making concerns highly vulnerable individuals, and AI deployment in asylum falls within half the high-risk categories in the EU AI Act. As a hard case, asylum decision-making thus enables us to address wider concerns about AI in public administration and courts.

The project team is uniquely positioned to develop such an approach for trustworthy AI. In a previous NordForsk project, we built a unique data infrastructure of asylum decisions (s2-Data). It permits application of data science techniques on large volumes of decisions, while restricting and minimising access to personal data. This infrastructure allows NordAId to develop, test, and evaluate a spectrum of generalisable AI models with user partners. This way, the project can develop a ‘meta-framework’ for assessing and extending the trustworthiness of AI-based decision-making, focusing on improving decision-making through value-creating solutions that go beyond merely improving efficiency.