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. More information regarding the project is available here.

We are 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 of tangible issues using a responsible AI framework.