The development and deployment of a new project, service, product, or initiative, must consider potential ethical issues to ensure responsible innovation and sustainability. Trilateral Research offers ethical impact assessments to understand the potential ethical impacts of an initiative and identify how to avoid or minimise these negative impacts. Similarly, ethics-by-design helps build-in ethical protection in the early stages of developing a product or service. Together, these approaches include ethics throughout the design and development process to build superior technologies and services that better support human flourishing and avoid negative impacts.

Technological development provides organisations with the tools to interpret, analyse, and assess larger amounts of data at a much faster pace. This drives responsive, informed decision making, and ensures that organisations meet the needs and expectations of their customers and maintain their competitive edge. Our team works closely with our clients and end-users in an iterative, agile, user-centered manner, to develop bespoke ethical-AI solutions able to provide data-driven insights of strategic and operational utility while ensuring data is understandable and contextualised. 

Our clients and partners want to understand how socio-economic, political and technological drivers will impact innovation in a particular domain in the future. Trilateral has over 15 years of scenario experience across diverse contents (e.g., emerging technologies, populism). Our techniques help stakeholders unveil hidden assumptions and coordinate insights from their expertise to tease out issues that might otherwise be missed.

Our tailored policy research and analysis presents policymakers with practical solution-based recommendations to policy concerns and issues. We have engaged international, EU and national policymakers on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data protection, ethics assessment and ethical impact assessment, human trafficking, ICT, privacy impact assessment, privacy seals, surveillance, and water security standards. We do policy monitoring, policy research and evaluation (including options analysis), produce guidance and recommendations for interventions (reports, white papers, policy briefs). We also create impact by feeding research into policy consultations.

We develop, apply, and inform the development of standards to maximise project output and avoid negative impacts and unwanted consequences. Trilateral has contributed to existing standards (ISO 29134), CEN Workshop Agreements (CWA 17145-2 and CWA 17147), and currently participates in international and national working groups in artificial intelligence, blockchain, immersive technologies, privacy and cybersecurity. 

Technology pilots enable potential users to interact with and experience how a technology works before its launch. Not piloting a technology, risks it failing when launched; wasting financial investment in and potentially damaging an organisation’s reputation. Technology pilots test, validate, and evaluate new technologies to provide developers, end-users, and evaluators with insights on what is and is not working.  Our team works closely with our clients to evaluate technologies in the environment where they will be adopted by end-users, ensure the impact of the technology is understood from different viewpoints and perspectives and draw on different research methods (e.g., interviews, workshops, participant observation, surveys) to engage with pilot participants.

Modern cutting-edge research is data intensive. Trilateral Research works with our clients to identify the main challenges and strategic opportunities that relate to managing data within research projects, manage data protection impact assessments, and develop a robust legal/ethical compliance strategy and a proactive, positive outlook on ways to maximise the benefits from managing your project’s research data. Trilateral has extensive experience developing research data management strategies for large and small projects across different research domains and sensitive projects e.g., artificial intelligence solutions, climate, cybersecurity, health, law enforcement.

Machine learning is increasingly having an impact in many domains however such use can raise ethical issues and can have serious consequences, for example, in predictive policing, financial lending, or family screening. Trilateral Research evaluates machine learning algorithms using a diverse set of algorithmic transparency and audit techniques to make decision-making processes more transparent, identify and analyse situations where they perform poorly, and probe for biases. Our interdisciplinary team of experts develops AI to support ethical decision making by humans, not to replace it.

Trilateral offers a range of impact assessments (basic to comprehensive) to suit client needs – each tailored to context and project. These include integrated and specific impact assessments. Our privacy and/or data protection impact assessments help organisations comply with privacy and data protections standards and requirements and support Privacy-by-Design. Social Impact Assessments  identify how new projects, technologies or services might impact communities and society and help mitigate potential risks and maximise positive impact. Socio-economic impact assessments help identify and address significant and adverse impacts of technologies early-on and help policymakers guide the development of technologies to increase social and economic benefit. Human rights impact assessments examine policies, legislation, projects and initiatives for their impacts on human rights and help clients determine how human rights might be adversely affected by their activities and what they can do to address this and avoid them in the future.

Collecting user requirements enables engineers and technologists to build the narrative of what a solution will achieve, why it is important to achieve this, and how this can be done. Gathering and analysing these involves different methods matched to the product or service. Trilateral Research’s team works closely with clients to discover user needs, pain points, and potential benefits. We investigate what goals are users trying to achieve, what barriers prevent users from realising these goals and why they exist, how legal, ethical and privacy concerns affect these goals, and how proposed solutions impact current client practices.