Università di Trento prof Passerini wins €8M grant for the revolution of human-centric AI systems

The new EU-funded project that will kick off in autumn 2023, with 21 partner organizations from 9 countries across Europe, is set to develop a new generation of human-centric AI systems and to strengthen the leadership of Europe in this area

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds tremendous potential to enhance human decisions and avoid cognitive overload and bias in high-stakes scenarios. To date, however, the adoption of AI-based support systems has been minimal in settings such as hospitals, tribunals, and public administrations.

The EU recognizes the need to foster research and innovation in this field, and on 13 March, TANGO secured €8M to develop the theoretical foundations and the computational framework for synergistic human-machine decision-making, paving the way for the next generation of human-centric AI systems. The new EU-funded project that will kick off in autumn 2023, with 21 partner organizations from 9 countries across Europe, is set to strengthen the leadership of Europe in this area.

TANGO argues that for AI to fully develop its enormous potential in terms of positive impact on individuals, society, and the economy, we need to completely rethink how AI systems are conceived. People should feel they can trust the systems they interact with, in terms of the reliability of their predictions and decisions, the capacity of the systems to understand their needs, and guarantees that they are genuinely aiming at supporting them rather than some undisclosed third party. In other words, a symbiosis should be established between humans and machines, in which all parties are aligned in terms of values, goals, and beliefs, and support and complement each other to reach objectives beyond what each would be able to do by itself.

“It takes two to TANGO! Our perspective is that a deep mutual understanding between humans and machines is essential for the development of truly effective and innovative AI systems that can expand human reasoning and decision-making capabilities“ says the project coordinator Andrea Passerini.

The potential impact on individuals and society of the TANGO framework will be evaluated on a pool of real-world use cases of extremely high social impact, namely supporting women during pregnancy and postpartum, supporting surgical teams in intraoperative decision-making, supporting loan officers and applicants in credit lending decision processes, and helping public policymakers in designing incentives and allocating funds. The success of these case studies will foster the adoption of TANGO as the framework of reference for developing a new generation of synergistic AI systems and will strengthen the leadership of Europe in human-centric AI.