Facebook to fund Munich institute for ethics in AI

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) is receiving a €6.5 million (US$7.4 million) donation from Facebook to set up an institute looking into ethics issues in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

TUM’s Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence is to explore areas such as health, policy-making, business and the web economy, and will address transparency, accountability, human rights and other issues in the context of human-AI interactions. Facebook is spreading its funding for the new institute, scheduled to open in February, over a five-year period.

“We want to provide guidelines to identify and answer ethical issues relating to AI for society, industry and legislation,” says Christoph Lütge, the new institute’s director. Lütge, a professor of business ethics at TUM, was recently appointed to the German federal government’s ethics commission on autonomous driving.

TUM has already been active in a number of areas concerning AI, setting out from the key issue of implications for and links between the new technology and society and culture. Its guiding notion of ‘human-centred engineering’ resulted in the setting up of the Munich Center for Technology in Society in 2012, in the context of the government-funded ‘Excellence Initiative’ to boost innovative universities.

“Innovative cycles of relevance to society are not feasible without an overall ethical, legal and political perspective,” notes TUM’s Vice-president Thomas Hofmann, explaining that this strategic dimension was the reason for setting up the new institute as part of the Munich Center for Technology in Society.

Last year, the TUM School of Governance contributed to the report An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society, presented by AI4People, a group of European researchers brought together by the Atomium European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy (Atomium EISMD).

Launched at the European Parliament in 2009 to promote communication between researchers, universities, business, the media, policy-makers and citizens, Atomium EISMD seeks to enhance collaboration in the three fields of science, media and democracy.

The university now also has a school of robotics and machine intelligence.

Michael Gardner Email: michael.gardner@uw-news.com