Mainflux Labs is a Member of EU Funded Consortium Which Aims Toward Trustworthy AI In Cyber Security

Mainflux Labs is participating in SPATIAL, an EU H2020 program-funded project whose goal is to develop mechanisms, verification methods, and guidelines for trustworthy AI solutions in the cybersecurity domain

Sasa Klopanovic
Mainflux IoT Platform
4 min readOct 28, 2021

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Companies and governments are adopting artificial intelligence at a fast rate to make better decisions, improve operational processes, and enhance products and services. Furthermore, a huge amount of media space is dedicated to AI’s accomplishments announcing the dawn of a new era.

However, there are serious issues with this advanced technology. The most critical ones, algorithmic bias and lack of transparency create risks that cannot be ignored. Humans have difficulty understanding how the systems reach their decisions, therefore it is hard to detect hidden biases, when a system makes errors, it is very difficult to discover the problem and make corrections and it is usually impossible to determine that a system will work in all mission-critical conditions.

Considering in this context AI’s ubiquitous potential for utilization across numerous sectors — from transportation, manufacturing, healthcare to national security — civil society groups, governments, and academic researchers have expressed concerns about AI, related to safety, discrimination, and racial bias all of which led Europe to declare trustworthy Artificial Intelligence as its highest priority.

SPATIAL — Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence

We at Mainflux Labs are excited and honored to participate in SPATIAL — Security and Privacy Accountable Technology Innovations, Algorithms, and Machine Learning — an EU funded consortium that aims to address

hurdles of artificial intelligence in a critical domain such as cybersecurity.

The SPATIAL consortium is coordinated by Dr. Aaron Ding (TU Delft, Netherlands) and brings together academia and industry across Europe.

Within the 3 years time frame, Mainflux Labs will cooperate in this research and innovation initiative with Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), Fraunhofer Society (Germany) Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo (Spain), University College Dublin (Ireland), Montimage (France), University of Tartu (Estonia), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), Australo Interinnov Marketing Lab SL (Spain), Reaktor (Finland), F-Secure (Finland), and NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH (Germany).

SPATIAL focus on Accountability, Privacy and Resilience for Trustworthy AI in cybersecurity.

SPATIAL will focus on two major aspects:

  • how to secure AI-driven ICT systems
  • how to enhance AI-empowered security solutions in terms of accountability, privacy and resilience.

The first “how-to” will cover data bias/poisoning, while the second “how to” target black-box AI in security solutions.

The challenges that will be addressed range from the underlying hardware-level — e.g., Trusted Execution Environment — to the higher algorithmic/software level.

SPATIAL objectives and practical measures to achieve them are planned as follows:

  • Systematic verification and validation software/hardware mechanisms that ensure AI transparency and explainability in security solution development
  • System solutions, platforms, and standards that enhance resilience in the deployment of AI-based cybersecurity solutions in decentralized, uncontrolled environments
  • Effective and practical adoption and adaptation guidelines for software developers to ensure streamlined implementation of trustworthy AI in cybersecurity

Except for these technical goals SPATIAL ambition is to create educational modules that provide social-technical skills and ethical socio-legal awareness to current and future AI engineers and communication framework that enables accountable and transparent understanding of AI applications between users and service providers.

“With massive IoT deployments in last years and expected yet to come with a large universe of some 50 billion devices, where each instance represents a potential vulnerability, makes IoT security a pressing issue. This is why we are looking forward to leverage technologies that will be developed by SPATIAL as well to acquire domain knowledge derived from cooperation with leading EU academia and industry” said Sasa Klopanovic, director of Mainflux Labs.

More information about SPATIAL is available http://spatial-h2020.eu/.

SPATIAL has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101021808.

Mainflux Labs

Mainflux Labs is a technology company offering a unified IoT system consisting of integrated open-source IoT Cloud and Edge Computing technology, which can meet the requirements of the most complex IoT projects, solutions and products.

To learn more about Mainflux visit our website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn!

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