Ethical AI.
Build better.
Decide better.
Ethics matters.
Way too often we see technology companies create Artificial Intelligence solutions that fail to adequately consider their impact on individuals and societies.
At Trilateral Research, we are working to change this.
Our Ethical AI solutions tackle complex social problems using cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, data visualisation and integration, and cloud computing, with a strong focus on ethics and data protection as the key catalyst for a sustainable use of AI in the future.
We focus on transparency, accountability, and fairness to develop human-centred AI applications that are tailored to each client’s needs and effectively supports their decision-making processes while protecting individuals and achieving strict standards of explainability.
Facts and Problems
AI isn’t always ethical and transparent
Artificial Intelligence is not always built to enhance the capacity for human decision-making. Its scope and function are not always transparent, intelligible, or understandable.
AI tools built with good intentions can still have unforeseen bad consequences – infringing on individual rights, violating people’s privacy, or harming societal or environmental wellbeing.
Managing the complex relationship between people, processes and technology to ensure that AI tools are built and implemented ethically and sustainably has become highly complicated, yet remains an ethical and legal obligation.
It’s hard to understand how AI actually works
How an Artificial Intelligence algorithm works can be a complex matter to understand or explain. How it produces a particular outcome is not always clear. Why its output is important to end users can be difficult to assess. When users cannot understand an AI system’s outputs, they cannot make well-informed data-driven decisions. False positives can go undetected. As new AI regulations enter into force, organisations will fall outside of regulatory compliance without a clear, transparent approach to building and implementing explainable AI.
Navigating ethical AI regulations is complex
In 2019, there already existed over 85 regulations, guidelines, and recommendations for creating ethical Artificial Intelligence. This number has only grown ever since, and it will continue to increase with new laws planned to enter into force in the UK, the EU and the USA over the next few years.
With an ever-changing regulatory landscape, ensuring legal and ethical compliance remains yet another obstacle on the path to leveraging AI to tackle complex societal challenges.
Solutions
Our Ethical AI solutions are built from the ground up with strong ethics- and privacy by-design. We focus on transparency, explainability, accountability, non-discrimination, and enhancing human decision-making. Each of our products is subject to on-going ethics and privacy impact assessments to ensure responsible development.
Our advanced ethics monitoring and ethical impact assessment processes demonstrate how our Ethical AI software solutions are charting a new path in defining good practices for the ethical use of AI, ultimately helping build trust among customers and the public.
Our goal is to ensure that users of our Ethical AI solutions can understand their outputs in a meaningful and actionable way, building trust and confidence in their use. We use interpretable rather than black box models, and build UI/UX components that enhance explainability and understandability.
Our multidisciplinary team of social scientists, data scientists, ethical, legal and human rights professionals is selected among the finest experts in their fields to successfully bridge the technology-social disciplinary divide. Our rigorous assessment and development of explainable AI models ensure that our tools achieve sustainable innovation and measurable impact.
Our legal and ethics processes ensure that all our Ethical AI solutions are compliant with the latest AI regulations and standards, and we are an early adopter of the UK’s algorithmic transparency standard. We remain current on new regulatory developments in the UK, EU and USA. Our Innovation & Research team also works on informing the development of international AI regulations and standards.
We develop a human-centred approach, which is tailored to each client’s needs and effectively supports their decision-making process for a smooth integration of our software within each organisation.
Our co-design methods, which elicit input from end users and stakeholders, combine and maximise ethical, societal and technological opportunities while minimising risk, resulting in practical and bespoke ethical AI solutions.
Thanks to our expert and multidisciplinary team, we can help you gain a comprehensive understanding of your context and your organisation’s proximity to the societal problem and enable you to use data-driven decision-making to help address it.
Accountability means establishing mechanisms and procedures to ensure responsibility during development and use our Ethical AI software. Putting clear lines of accountability in place helps promote transparency and trust: both our clients and the public can feel confident our AI products and services are planned and monitored, that someone is responsible for the ethical development of the tools, and that anyone can request an explanation for why we make particular development choices.
We empower our own people to communicate their opinions, ask questions and make decisions all of which ensures that our employees feel a greater sense of ownership and accountability for the Ethical AI solutions they build.
Ethical AI is a shared responsibility between Trilateral Research and our clients. Sharing responsibility alleviates the client’s burden as Trilateral creates AI tools that:
- Establish transparency regarding data collection, data processing and scope of use;
- Identify and mitigate data bias;
- Provide clear lines of accountability;
- Protect the privacy of human subjects;
- Encourage end users’ understanding and self-assessment of the products’ output.
The client assumes responsibility for the ethical use and management of our tools. Sharing responsibility allows for the flexibility and control that clients need to integrate and operationalise the tool into a business-as-usual environment.
AI tools are neither intrinsically good nor bad, but they can be used in ways that promote or undermine ethical values and fundamental rights. Consequently, clients are responsible for:
- Integrating the product into their organisation;
- Complying with all applicable laws and legislation;
- Investigating the potential for operational biases;
- Self-assessing the AI output (“sanity checks”);
- Understanding both the nuances of, and changes to, the operational environment in which they are using the tool;
- Explaining to affected stakeholders how the tool informed decision making.
We encourage clients to talk to us about their responsibilities. We offer ethics consulting services including ethics roadmaps, assessments, audits, deep dives, ethics awareness trainings and ethics-driven strategies.
STRIAD Analytics Platform
STRIAD is our secure, cloud-based, Ethical AI platform delivering data-driven solutions to customers across a range of contexts and sectors.
CESIUM Application
CESIUM augments safeguarding decision-making by identifying and prioritising children at risk to harm.
STRIAD:HONEYCOMB
STRIAD:HONEYCOMB helps police forces, NGOs, and safeguarding professionals better understand modern slavery and human trafficking.
STRIAD:HAMOC
STRIAD:HAMOC is a situational awareness and decision-support application servicing a data-driven understanding of the human environment in complex operational scenarios.
STRIAD:AIRQUALITY
STRIAD:AIRQUALITY helps local authorities understand and leverage air quality and pollution data in their area to support urban planning and citizen welfare.
STRIAD Ecosystem
Today’s societal problems are complex and multi-faceted. Technology has the power to help in incredibly valuable ways, but we believe it’s people who are (and should) remain at the heart of solving our biggest problems and making the right decisions. That’s why our ethical AI products are embedded in an ecosystem of sociotechnical services, from data protection and privacy to in-depth subject matter expertise. Read more about our sociotechnical approach here.
As more and more services, systems and processes move online, organisations are handling more data and sensitive information than ever before. This is especially true when building and deploying our ethical AI solutions. Fortunately, our Data Protection team is always on-hand, ready go providing the in-depth yet practical support needed to understand your concerns and requirements, help confidently navigate regulatory and ethical challenges, and ensure you can access and leverage the right data in the right way – responsibly, confidently, and ethically.
Cybersecurity gaps can cause significant financial costs, impact public trust, cause untold stress, and sap limited time from working on your biggest problems. Our Cybersecurity team helps ensure industry-standard levels of security for all our Ethical AI solutions, from cloud infrastructure security and penetration testing, to endpoint security and secure client access. Our team puts in place the right measures that narrow our solutions’ attack surfaces, turn employees into a first line of defence, and achieve compliance with the relevant cybersecurity standards.
Technology is not value neutral. When building our Ethical AI solutions, we focus on transparency and accountability to develop a human-centred and tailored approach. Our Ethics Innovation team helps maximise ethical opportunities while minimising risk, resulting in both practical and ethical AI solutions. From Ethics Impact Assessments (EIA) to assess the full ethical impact of our solutions (including ethical risks and opportunities), to mitigating data biases and discrimination, to leveraging our team’s Explainable AI (XAI) methods and approaches to ensure you can understand how and why an algorithm produces a particular output – you can be sure that all our ethical AI solutions have been stress-tested to the highest levels of ethical rigour and standards. As we like to say, ethics is our innovation.
Sitting at the crossroads of social science, subject matter expertise, and ethical technology, we help customers’ tackle their challenges through understanding the problem, assessing what’s needed, generating actionable insights, and delivering practical knowledge and guidance to help address complex societal issues. Our Sociotechnical Insights Group (SIG) team is pivotal in ensuring you get the value you need from our Ethical AI solutions, from providing the expertise to help train our NLP models and sourcing the right data, to helping you interpret and understand insights, to training your personnel on how to make better use of data to tackle your strategic and operational priorities.
Our Innovation & Research (I&R) team conducts cutting edge research into some of the biggest societal challenges of our time, from climate change and technology ethics, to safeguarding, conflict and crisis, and human rights. The I&R team is a critical asset in the development of expert-driven Ethical AI solutions.
As more and more services, systems and processes move online, organisations are handling more data and sensitive information than ever before. This is especially true when building and deploying our ethical AI solutions. Fortunately, our Data Protection team is always on-hand, ready go providing the in-depth yet practical support needed to understand your concerns and requirements, help confidently navigate regulatory and ethical challenges, and ensure you can access and leverage the right data in the right way – responsibly, confidently, and ethically.
Cybersecurity gaps can cause significant financial costs, impact public trust, cause untold stress, and sap limited time from working on your biggest problems. Our Cybersecurity team helps ensure industry-standard levels of security for all our Ethical AI solutions, from cloud infrastructure security and penetration testing, to endpoint security and secure client access. Our team puts in place the right measures that narrow our solutions’ attack surfaces, turn employees into a first line of defence, and achieve compliance with the relevant cybersecurity standards.
Technology is not value neutral. When building our Ethical AI solutions, we focus on transparency and accountability to develop a human-centred and tailored approach. Our Ethics Innovation team helps maximise ethical opportunities while minimising risk, resulting in both practical and ethical AI solutions. From Ethics Impact Assessments (EIA) to assess the full ethical impact of our solutions (including ethical risks and opportunities), to mitigating data biases and discrimination, to leveraging our team’s Explainable AI (XAI) methods and approaches to ensure you can understand how and why an algorithm produces a particular output – you can be sure that all our ethical AI solutions have been stress-tested to the highest levels of ethical rigour and standards. As we like to say, ethics is our innovation.
Our Innovation & Research (I&R) team conducts cutting edge research into some of the biggest societal challenges of our time, from climate change and technology ethics, to safeguarding, conflict and crisis, and human rights. The I&R team is a critical asset in the development of expert-driven Ethical AI solutions.
ETHICAL AI Ecosystem
Today’s societal problems are complex and multi-faceted. Technology has the power to help in incredibly valuable ways, but we believe it’s people who are (and should) remain at the heart of solving our biggest problems and making the right decisions. That’s why our Ethical AI products are embedded in an ecosystem of sociotechnical services which brings together social science and subject matter expertise, human factors, and advanced technologies into the design of every solution – from data protection and privacy to in-depth subject matter expertise. Read more about our sociotechnical approach here.
