Center for Responsible AI

Developing next-generation AI products, based on the technologies and principles of Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

Project Overview

The Center for Responsible AI is one of the largest centers ever dedicated to Responsible AI, bringing together ten startups, including two unicorns, eight research centers, a law firm, and also five industry leaders in Life Sciences, Tourism and Retail. The research centers, startups and industry leaders will collaborate to develop 21 innovative AI products leveraged by Responsible AI technologies such as fairness, explainability and sustainability.

The Center will position Portugal and Europe as a global leader in these technologies, as well as in principles and regulation in this domain, contributing to EU legislation in Artificial Intelligence and attracting the best AI talent in the world.

The Center for Responsible AI project is funded by Next Generation EU through the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR). Led by Unbabel, this project is carried out by a consortium of 14 partners from different fields, ranging from research to industrial development.

Our Involvement

The core mission of LUMLIS within the project consortium is to spearhead R&D efforts focused on practical solutions for universal challenges. LUMLIS researchers from three different research centers associated to IST (i.e., INESC-ID, IT, and ISR) are involved in the project's activities.

At INESC-ID, R&D is led by Bruno Martins, a member of the Human Language Technologies (HLT) group and Associate Professor at IST, together with other researchers from the IDSS, GSD, and GAIPS groups.

At IT, R&D is led by Mário Figueiredo, Distinguished Professor at IST and head of LUMLIS, together with André Martins, Associate Professor at IST and VP of AI Research at Unbabel.

At ISR, R&D is led by José Santos Vitor, Full Professor at IST and coordinator Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS), together with other researchers from the Computer and Robot Vision Lab (VisLab).

R&D Activities

LUMLIS is currently pursuing various R&D activities related to the various work-packages within the project:


  • • Energy-Efficient and Sustainable AI - This activity will investigate and develop new scientific methods and technologies for making AI systems more energy and data efficient, an important goal for the European Green Deal.
  • • Privacy-Preserving AI Systems - This activity will develop methods for policy-compliant, privacy-preserving, and confidential-compute AI systems.
  • • Transparent, Fair and Explainable AI - Understanding the decision-making processes of complex models is key to develop interpretable and explainable human-centered systems that interact positively and fairly with humans, including non-experts. This activity will address these needs to allow a fairer, unbiased, reliable and more accountable use of AI in making decisions that affect human beings.
  • • Language Technologies and Embodied Human-AI Interaction - This activity will focus on investigating new techniques for robust and trustworthy NLP and vision technologies, envisioning a scenario where humans and AI systems work together collaboratively.
  • • Multilingual and Contextualized Conversational AI - This activity will advance the state of the art in conversational AI by making progress in two fronts: removing language barriers, by designing systems that are multilingual (via machine translation technologies), and by enhancing dialogue systems with contextualization, with particular focus on customer service communication.

These research activities collectively contribute to the tackling tangible issues using a responsible AI framework.

Project Funding

The Center for Responsible AI is funded by the European Union through Next Generation EU as part of the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR). More information regarding the project, as well as the full list of funding beneficiaries, is available from the project website, and also from here.


Contact

Reach out to us!

Location:

INESC-ID Lisboa

Rua Alves Redol, 9

1000-029, Lisboa, Portugal