From the 21st to the 22nd of November 2024, ALFIE  (https://alfie-project.eu) held its kick-off meeting in Nicosia, Cyprus. This was the first time partners met in person to discuss and plan our activities for the coming months of the project. 

ALFIE with the grant number 101177912 stands for Assessment of Learning technologies and Frameworks for Intelligent and Ethical AI.

The ALFIE project will create an ecosystem that combines advanced AI technology with ethical standards, ensuring that the resulting AI systems are not only high-performing but also fair, transparent, and free from bias. The project focuses on building two key components:

1. EthiTech Dialogue Hub (ETD-Hub): A platform for dialogue and collaboration where AI experts, policymakers, legal professionals, and citisens can discuss and shape the ethical and legal aspects of AI. This platform will serve as a hub for exchanging ideas, understanding societal needs, and defining policies that ensure AI technologies are used responsibly.
2. AutoML Platform: A platform designed to allow users to easily create machine learning models, even without technical expertise. This platform will prioritise ethics and compliance with European Union regulations, helping ensure that AI models are fair, transparent, and trustworthy. The platform will automate much of the machine learning process, from selecting algorithms to tuning models, making AI more accessible to a broader audience.

ALFIE consortium consists of ten experienced and committed partners. Lead by the SME Catalink Limited, it has one industrial partner (Bosch), and two  SMEs Distributed Analytics Solutions  (DAS) and Diadikasia Business Consulting (DBC) with strong exploitation and innovation interest in the AI domain.

There are 2 research partners CERTH and Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT) and 4 academic partners (University of Brighton, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edge Hill University, and Eindhoven University of Technology).

The ten partners are from six different European countries, namely, Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia, Spain, Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with broad geographic coverage, as well as combining expertise in several different disciplines.

Two special guests participated in our KOM. From the advisory board Yannis Manololopulis Professor Emeritus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Member of Academia Europaea, London.  Yannis is an expert on data management and will follow the progress of the project. Professor Dr Lilian Mitrou also attended the first day of the KOM. She is professor at the University of the Aegean-Greece (Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering). As an expert in law and data protection law, she will be acting as the External Ethical Advisor for ALFIE.

Over the course of two days, partners worked together to shape project work over the coming months in regard to developing AI models, use cases, technological requirements, communication and dissemination.