OEI - Requirement No. 1

Ethics Advisor_It is not fully clear how the participants of the co-design, co-creation and evaluation activities will be recruited.The actual extent of personal data collection and processing is also not sufficiently described, since it is planned to integrate SSH disciplines such religious viewpoints for understanding the application areas, phycological, legal, and sociological aspects considering intersectional factors (gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, disability) (DoA Part B, page 19), while it is also stated in the self-assessment that information regarding race, gender, religion or political orientation will never be requested. Thus, it should be explained how all of the data intended to be processed in the project is relevant and limited to the purposes of the research project (in accordance with the ‘data minimisation ‘principle).The AI to be developed/used in the project may lead to discrimination of people, potential bias, social or economic disadvantage especially in the AI for Digital Finance sector (DoA Part B, page 16) where solutions are provided despite the lack of adequate quantity of training datasets. Therefore, the ethics risks related to the development/deployment of the AI systems/techniques should be evaluated more thoroughly and mitigation plans for potential negative social impacts should be considered.An independent Ethics Advisor should be appointed with a mandate to oversee the project activities, in particular task T1.4 and provide relevant requirements with regards to participation of humans, personal data protection and AI. Reports prepared by the external independent Ethics Advisor must be submitted as deliverables in M12 and 24.The applicant is invited to send the CV of the suggested Ethics Advisor and discuss their appointment with the Project Officer as soon as possible after the start of the action. Guidance for Ethics Advisors/Boards can be found under the European Commission Funding and Tenders portal.