Prediction is Power, Also in the Public Sector

by Maarten de Rijke & Anne Schuth

AI is entering every aspect of our lives. The ability to reliably predict outcomes of actions, and the control that it promises, prove to be attractive in many sectors of society. At ICAI, the Innovation Center for AI, our vision is to foster shared development of knowledge, innovation and talent in AI across multiple stakeholders: knowledge institutes, industrial partners, governmental partners, societal partners. We believe that AI and its power should be in the hands of many and not just a few. So far, the public sector has been slower to adopt AI than many industries. But this is slowly changing. Based on the experiences of collaborative research labs with governmental stakeholders in ICAI, we will illustrate some of the technical and socio-technical challenges that come with the development of AI in government. Ambitions touched upon include improved citizen services, enhanced public safety and security, enabling data-driven decision making, and the pursuit of broader policy goals, such as improving public health, environmental protection, strengthening national security and defense, and enhancing citizen engagement. Going beyond ICAI's experiences in AI development in a governmental setting, Anne Schuth will join the talk to present and demo an ongoing pilot within our national government, on automatically converting Dutch law into executable code. Maarten de Rijke is a Distinguished University Professor of AI and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam, and a Co-founder and the Scientific Director of the national Innovation Center for AI (ICAI). Anne Schuth is an Engineer at the Bureau Architecture for the Dutch Government, where he focuses on AI and engineering solutions for digital government.