On 21 April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first legal framework on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the risks posed by this emerging method of computation. The Commission proposed a Regulation known as the AI Act. The proposed AI Act considers not only machine learning, but expert systems and statistical models long in place. Under the proposed AI Act, new obligations are set to ensure transparency, lawfulness, and fairness. Their goal is to establish mechanisms to ensure quality at launch and throughout the whole life cycle of AI-based systems, thus ensuring legal certainty that encourages innovation and investments on AI systems while preserving fundamental rights and values. A standardisation process is ongoing: several entities (e.g., ISO) and scholars are discussing how to design systems that are compliant with the forthcoming Act, and explainability metrics play a significant role. Specifically, the AI Act sets some new minimum requirements of explicability (transparency and explainability) for a list of AI systems labelled as “high-risk” listed in Annex III. These requirements include a plethora of technical explanations capable of covering the right amount of information, in a meaningful way. This paper aims to investigate how such technical explanations can be deemed to meet the minimum requirements set by the law and expected by society. To answer this question, with this paper we propose an analysis of the AI Act, aiming to understand (1) what specific explicability obligations are set and who shall comply with them and (2) whether any metric for measuring the degree of compliance of such explanatory documentation could be designed. Moreover, by envisaging the legal (or ethical) requirements that such a metric should possess, we discuss how to implement them in a practical way. More precisely, drawing inspiration from recent advancements in the theory of explanations, our analysis proposes that metrics to measure the kind of explainability endorsed by the proposed AI Act shall be risk-focused, model-agnostic, goal-aware, intelligible, and accessible. Therefore, we discuss the extent to which these requirements are met by the metrics currently under discussion.

Big data and Machine learning Techniques are reshaping the way in which food safety risk assessment is conducted. The ongoing ‘datafication’ of food safety risk assessment activities and the progressive deployment of probabilistic models in their practices requires a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of these advances. In particular, the low level of trust in EU food safety risk assessment framework highlighted in 2019 by an EU-funded survey could be exacerbated by novel methods of analysis. The variety of processed data raises unique questions regarding the interplay of multiple regulatory systems alongside food safety legislation. Provisions aiming to preserve the confidentiality of data and protect personal information are juxtaposed to norms prescribing the public disclosure of scientific information. This research is intended to provide guidance for data governance and data ownership issues that unfold from the ongoing transformation of the technical and legal domains of food safety risk assessment. Following the reconstruction of technological advances in data collection and analysis and the description of recent amendments to food safety legislation, emerging concerns are discussed in light of the individual, collective and social implications of the deployment of cutting-edge Big Data collection and analysis techniques. Then, a set of principle-based recommendations is proposed by adapting high-level principles enshrined in institutional documents about Artificial Intelligence to the realm of food safety risk assessment. The proposed set of recommendations adopts Safety, Accountability, Fairness, Explainability, Transparency as core principles (SAFETY), whereas Privacy and data protection are used as a meta-principle.

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This paper presents a refinement of PrOnto ontology using a validation test based on legal experts' annotation of privacy policies combined with an Open Knowledge Extraction algorithm. Three iterations were performed, and a final test using new privacy policies. The results are 75% of detection of concepts and relationships in the policy texts and an increase of 29% in the accuracy using the new refined version of PrOnto enriched with SKOS-XL lexicon terms and definitions.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more and more pervasive in our everyday life, new questions arise about its ethical and social impacts. Such issues concern all stakeholders involved in or committed to the design, implementation, deployment, and use of the technology. The present document addresses these preoccupations by introducing and discussing a set of practical obligations and recommendations for the development of applications and systems based on AI techniques. With this work we hope to contribute to spreading awareness on the many social challenges posed by AI and encouraging the establishment of good practices throughout the relevant social areas. As points of novelty, the paper elaborates on an integrated view that combines both human rights and ethical concepts to reap the benefits of the two approaches. Moreover, it proposes innovative recommendations, such as those on redress and governance, which add further insight to the debate. Finally, it incorporates a specific focus on the Italian Constitution, thus offering an example of how core legislations of Member States might contribute to further specify and enrich the EU normative framework on AI.