Eureka! Europe’s AI regulation as an oppor­tunity, security and room for maneuver

As a European AI company, we at DeepVA have often faced the challenge of navigating an environment charac­terized by uncer­tainty regarding future AI regula­tions in recent years.

Origi­nating from a research project at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences (read more about us here), we have placed a strong focus on the specific needs of European media companies, munic­i­pal­ities and univer­sities since 2017. Small and medium-sized providers like us in particular, who do not have large legal depart­ments, see the oppor­tunity to offer solutions that are designed from the outset to meet our European and democ­ratic require­ments and integrate these mecha­nisms, such as the automatic “forgetting” of data records after a certain period of time, into their structure. This ensures data protection not only for the user, but also for third parties who are included in the image database, for example.

With the imple­men­tation of the EU AI Act, an important orien­tation has now been created. This devel­opment was recently deepened by the IRIS study of the European Audio­visual Obser­vatory (EAI), which provides a compre­hensive analysis of the legal challenges specif­i­cally for AI appli­ca­tions in the media sector. In particular, it empha­sizes that data protection — in conjunction with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — remains a corner­stone of the European AI strategy, especially in data-intensive sectors.

GDPR-compliant trans­parency and data protection

Author­ities, cities and univer­sities need powerful AI solutions that meet the highest data protection standards. That’s why at DeepVA, in addition to our SaaS solutions, we specif­i­cally offer European solutions that can also be installed completely on-premise if required. Our Composite AI Platform aims to combine multiple AI services such as speech recog­nition, facial recog­nition, object recog­nition and trans­lation for specific tasks while enabling full data sover­eignty.

For example, we enable univer­sities and colleges to use automatic transcription and subti­tling to make lectures, meetings or confer­ences more trans­parent and acces­sible without having to worry about data leakage or the training of other models, as all types of use, especially further processing for training purposes, are contrac­tually and techni­cally excluded.

Regional solutions as a compet­itive advantage

The EU’s IRIS study points out that most AI solutions are still developed outside Europe, which leads to excessive market power. For the European insti­tu­tions, this means challenges in terms of law enforcement and control, and for users, of course, a depen­dency on the technology companies. Of course, the products of such providers are conve­nient and easy to use, but in the past it has been negative experi­ences with infor­mation leaks that have also led individual customers to us. Devel­op­ments in the USA in recent weeks in particular have shown how volatile such business relation­ships can be in times of disruptive foreign policy or even become a political issue.

Respon­si­bility when using open source

At DeepVA, we take respon­si­bility for evalu­ating, integrating and contin­u­ously maintaining exciting models. Before integrating open source models, a legal evalu­ation and risk assessment is carried out in accor­dance with the AI Act to ensure compliance with all regulatory require­ments. In this way, our customers benefit from the latest devel­op­ments in the open source AI community without any risk to themselves, but also from our partners in research (e.g. University of Rhine-Main or Fraun­hofer), who can quickly and easily transfer their results to media companies or other appli­ca­tions. Every innovation is tested, integrated and profes­sionally supported so that author­ities and univer­sities remain agile with maximum security.

AI systems always raise ethical issues of discrim­i­nation and bias. At DeepVA, we actively address these challenges by using balanced training data and special technical proce­dures, one example being the use of focal loss functions that recognize and correct under­rep­re­sented groups in data sets. Among other things, we ensure that the systems make fair and non-discriminatory decisions and even enable our users to make quanti­tative state­ments about the diversity in their data sets or content by using our diversity analysis.

These tools and measures are not only the result of direct customer requests, but are also a funda­mental part of our own corporate values.

Legal certainty and compliance

Above all these issues, the major question of legal certainty and the clari­fi­cation of liability issues and regulatory compliance are key compo­nents of the imple­men­tation process for AI solutions. We try to provide our customers with the best possible support here and assist them with audits and, if necessary, by imple­menting additional mecha­nisms and certifi­cates. The same applies to the integration of third-party models, which are first subjected to a legal review, especially from the open source sector. In this way, the insti­tu­tions benefit in the long term from AI solutions that meet the constantly changing regulatory require­ments.

User commu­ni­cation and support

However, commu­ni­cation is not just about the legal framework. We are happy to support our customers in the creation of clear user infor­mation, tutorials or the imple­men­tation of warnings so that end users can handle AI safely and compe­tently. The focus is always on trans­parency, legal certainty and user-friendliness.

Mission: Using AI respon­sibly and safely

European AI regulation provides clear guide­lines for imple­menting innova­tions respon­sibly. Our goal is to provide the necessary tools in this field of action, not only to implement AI functions, but also to build and use our own data sets and models. With DeepVA, we support insti­tu­tions and companies in making the most of the oppor­tu­nities offered by open source and dynamic further devel­opment — AI, but with the credo: regional, data protection-compliant and yet innov­ative.

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