2024 in Review
20th December, 2024, by Ismael Kherroubi Garcia
Kathryn Conrad / Better Images of AI / Datafication / CC-BY 4.0
2024 has been a thrilling year for Kairoi. As we enter Q2 of our third fiscal year, we continue to thrive without external funding, relying solely on the success of our projects and the trust of our clients. From a financial perspective, this calendar year has demonstrated the value of Kairoi’s diversification of services. On the one hand, consulting on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) in organisational contexts remains the more challenging space to find fiscally viable projects. On the other hand, offering services on research governance has opened more stable flows of income for the company. With this, the following celebration of 2024 accomplishments are categorised according to whether they fit more in our “AI ethics” offerings, our “research governance“ offerings, or touch on both.
On the AI ethics front, 2024 has been a crucial year. Kairoi’s AI Ethics Canvas¹ was put to the test across built environments industries by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), whose WELL standards help foster health and wellbeing in the built environment. IWBI were seeking a framework within which to adopt AI across industries whilst continuing to enable human wellbeing. Between February and July, we tailored a series of workshops for IWBI’s “AI Champions”; staff from across departments and geographies who are keen on their related industries adopting AI thoughtfully. The workshops and Canvas ultimately helped co-create a framework for relevant organisations to pursue the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the responsible use of AI technologies
The learnings for Kairoi from this project were twofold. Firstly, our canvas is flexible enough not just to use within organisations but even across industries. Secondly, with our expert facilitation, the Four Pillars of Responsible AI² allow clients to better understand how diverse initiatives are relevant to both AI and the values they uphold. Consider the case of IWBI, where the UN SDGs served as guiding principles. Although the SDGs do not directly relate with AI, the four pillars helped articulate a total of 36 initiatives for AI to be adopted and implemented thoughtfully in built environments. Put more simply, the four pillars clearly bridge the gap between principles and actions.
On research governance, Kairoi has had a spectacular year with two ongoing projects. Firstly, the project initiated October 2023 has continued as planned and is successfully reaching its conclusion. Working with the Open Modeling Foundation (OMF) out of Arizona State University, we designed seven workshops on open science practices in the context of computational modelling. The workshops brought together experts from academic publications, biology, meteorology, data stewardship, and many other exciting areas to create a valuable space for cross-disciplinary learning. The project has had three major public outputs: workshop recordings,³ an academic preprint,⁴ and a forthcoming publication in a prestigious scientific journal. For Kairoi, the most valuable impacts of this project have been more fruitful discussions at the intersection of modelling, AI and community-led practices.
Secondly, during the summer of 2024, we began supporting GO FAIR US in communicating their learnings on data sharing in the life sciences. This work has followed three strands: (i) helping report on their findings to one of the US’s National Institutes of Health,⁵ creating authorship policies, and preparing academic preprints capturing learnings from their wider open science and data management advisory services. Through the work with OMF and GO FAIR US, we are proud to be facilitating contributions to scientific literature.
At the intersection of AI and research governance, we have delivered two projects in 2024. The first was a continuation of our work with Next Generation Internet (NGI), a European Commission initiative re-imagining the internet of tomorrow.6 Kairoi supports NGI’s open call process by assessing the ethical implications of the projects that NGI funds.⁶ Our work here builds on our own experience uncovering the value of research ethics committees for AI projects across academia and industry.⁷
The second project was the design and delivery of a presentation on AI ethics in the context of academia.⁸ The presentation was delivered in July during the online sessions of FORCE11’s 2024 conference.⁹ One key output from the presentation was a tool for mapping AI ethics solutions, which generally prioritise either the technical or the human, and are created either internally or procured externally. AI ethics was also clearly distinguished from AI safety, which often relies on hype about technological capabilities.
Looking to 2025
2024 has been an exceptional year for Kairoi, and we are already gearing up towards an even greater 2025. In the pipeline are continued projects, new partnerships, and exciting venues to promote the need for more thoughtful approaches to AI.
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